What's the best way to teach chess to children? Thinking with Chess: Teaching Children Ages 5-14 is a handbook for teachers, librarians, after-school instructors, chess coaches, counselors, and parents that requires no prior knowledge of the game. Both novices and veteran chess players can use its innovative lesson plans for teaching groups of children.

In Thinking with Chess, Dr. Alexey Root connects chess with skills important to academic success, such as classifying, pattern recognition, decoding, creating, and predicting. The book also introduces challenges for practicing divergent thinking and puzzles for convergent thinking.

Thinking with Chess teaches not only the fundamentals of chess - the chessmen and how they move, how to keep score, and where to play - but also tools useful in winning games, such as double check and smothered checkmate.

About the Author

Alexey Root has a Ph.D. in education from UCLA and is a senior lecturer at The University of Texas at Dallas, teaching education courses that explore the uses of chess. A tournament chess player since age nine, she was the U.S. Women's Champion in 1989.

After the introduction of the Chess merit badge in 2011, Dr. Root became a Boy Scouts of America merit badge counselor. She conducts chess workshops and tournaments at the National Scouting Museum.

Dr. Root's six previous books include Children and Chess: A Guide for Educators (2006) and Thinking With Chess: Teaching Children Ages 5-14 (2012).