Learning Chess Workbook Step 5

The step-by-step method has been developed by Rob Brunia and Cor van Wijgerden to teach children to play chess. A large number of schools and chess clubs in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Austria use this method for their chess lessons.

This method consists of six steps. Each step is accompanied with an instruction book with the teaching material to be used by the trainer / teacher / parent and a workbook with exercises for the students.

Step 5
The manual of Step 5 is the last one in the row for group teaching. Unfortunately, the number of students who reach step 5 level is not big. In this step the attention for tactics is less than in the previous steps, nevertheless, tactics remains to play the main part in the games of the students.

For step 5 students the positional aspects begin to play more and more important role. The lessons about the pawn structure, the seventh rank, strong square and open file contain many strategic aspects.

Playing according to a plan is important in chess, that is why it is discussed in some lessons about the endgame. They show how important the cooperation of the pieces is and how relative the value of the pieces can be. The lesson 'Defence' pays attention to some aspects which are almost by all the students insufficiently used.

Workbook Step 5
Next to the exercises there are also reminders in the workbook. These are short recapitulations of the lessons from the manual for the students. There are 11 reminders:
• Material and time 
• Using pawns 
• The pawn race 
• Discovered attack 
• Rook against pawn 
• Strong outpost 
• Defending 
• Rook ending 
• Open file 
• Draw 
• The wrong bishop

On the remaining 44 pages there are always 12 exercises a page. That means a total number of 44x12-23 (drawings) = 505 positions.