The Turkish Chess Federation and “I’m Growing up with Chess Club” (Satrançla Büyüyorum), with financial support from the SporToto Administration, have initiated a project that will establish chess corners in 1000 kindergartens across Turkey, introducing pupils in these kindergartens to chess and providing professional chess education to teachers in order to disseminate chess in kindergartens during the 2015-2016 academic term.
The project will be initiated in regional centres such as Ankara, Denizli, Diyarbakır, Erzurum, Gaziantep, İstanbul, İzmir, Kayseri, Kocaeli, Mersin, Ordu and Sivas, then will be put into practice in other provinces in the upcoming years.
Before the initiation of this project, in order to provide information about different chess teaching methods in Turkey and abroad; compare and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of teaching methods and eventually create an exemplary teaching method through the mutual exchange of ideas, the Turkish Chess Federation and I’m Growing up with Chess Club, with the financial support of the Republic of Turkey Promotion Fund, organized a workshop entitled “International Comparison of Chess Education Models for Preschool Level”.
The workshop took place on 13-14 June 2015 at Meyra Palace Hotel in Ankara.
Kevin O’Connell
International representatives included several FIDE-CiS people: Kevin O’Connell (Chairman), Alessandro Dominici (consultant to Chairman), Alexander Kostyev (Deputy Chairman of Higher Education and Research) and Radislav Atanassov (Bulgaria national coordinator).
In the TV clip, TSF President Gülkiz Tulay said “We will discuss how to integrate and disseminate chess in kindergartens and how to carry these activities far into the future. The kindergarten dimension of chess education will be discussed by leading chess figures from Turkey and experts from the World Chess Federation in depth. We will witness the progress of chess education in kindergartens in the upcoming workshops.”
In the same TV clip, Kevin O’Connell spoke of the research (from a respected Pedagogical University) announced at the conference in Yerevan last year, demonstrating the clear benefits of teaching chess to children. You may be able to hear the English, but if not, the significance of the hand was to show how the development (especially as regards their creativity) of children entering the first year of the Armenian chess in schools programme (at the age of 7 – the little finger) compared with those in the second year of the programme (ring finger), after three years of the programme (9 year olds – middle finger) and the ten year olds (index finger) who had not been involved at all in the chess programme.
Full report on the CiS website
