How to teach your child about checkers

My daughter was singing with her choir, so my son had a couple of hours to waste in Denver. We went to the Denver Public Library, and of course my son, who was 6, wanted to go to the Children’s Library. We left.

When we walked in, he got excited and his face lit up. She saw a giant game of checkers. Each piece was the size of one of her hands. She wanted to play. Now, I hadn’t played checkers with him before, but I remembered that my grandfather taught me to play checkers at that age. So, I tried it.

I didn’t just tell him the rules and the game. She was six years old and didn’t have that kind of patience. I told him the first two games were just scrimmages. We played together while she explained the rules to him. He was on board with this plan, and was happy that the first two games didn’t “count.”

What color do you want to be? “My grandfather told me smoke comes before fire, son, so black goes first.” He liked that little mnemonic and I heard him repeating it over several days. Naturally, he wanted to be black.

Move a piece one square. You can only go diagonally. I moved a piece diagonally to show you. I then moved a piece horizontally and vertically and said “you can’t move horizontally or vertically, only diagonally, and your pieces are always on the black squares”.

We moved some pieces and then I told him that the object of the game was to capture the other guy’s pieces and have the last remaining tiles on the board. He became a little more interested. I showed him how to recognize a jump and how to take a piece.

We played for a while and I set up a double under for him. Before his turn, I told him how to do a double and triple jump and asked him if there were places like that on the board. He found the double jump and took it.

I eventually got a piece for the other side and asked him to crown my new king. Then I showed him how a king could come and go. He was excited about that feature and decided to get some kings.

Finally, I explained to him that once he took his finger off the piece, his move was final. So if we weren’t sure about a move, he needed to keep his finger on his token.

That was the gist of the ground rules. We then played our first real game that “counted”. I hadn’t talked to him one bit about strategy yet, but he started saying things like “well, I can’t move here because you’ll jump me” and “if I get a lot of kings, I should be able to win.”