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Chess- Helping Kids with Autism

Chess- Helping Kids with Autism

In April 2021, 130 representatives of chess federations and FIDE academies met at a two-hour event, organized as part of the Autism Awareness Week. The audience included legendary figures like Judit Polgar, Artur Yusupov, and the former Women’s World Champion Antoaneta Stefanova. 

 

During this meeting five speakers from different parts of the world shared their experiences in teaching chess to children with ASD: Ala Mishchanka, a Special needs educational assistant from Canada with more than 15 years of experience, made an introduction to the concept of “Autism Spectrum Disorder”.

 

During this meeting, Ala Mishchanka stated “It is important to help children choose sports they are likely to enjoy and excel at but not every sport requires high-level communication and cooperation and could be a great match for children with autism. Chess is definitely one of them.”

 

Autism ABA / IBI Specialists identified that through their collective experiences a list of benefits of chess for children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder).

benefits of chess for children with ASD or autism

BENEFITS OF CHESS FOR CHILDREN WITH ASD

  • Promotes inclusion and quality of life.
  • Increases self-esteem and confidence.
  • Improves physical and mental health.
  • Reduces reliance on parents and other adults.
  • Provides satisfaction, enjoyment and pleasure.
  • Ability to meet individual and unique sensory needs of a child.
  • Increases independence which leads to increased opportunities.
  • Ability to provide a structured, predictable, and safe environment.
  • Provides opportunities for enjoyment and increased self-confidence.
  • Provides an opportunity to gain and develop new contacts and friends.
  • Gives children an opportunity to make their own choices, gaining a level of self-control.
  • Enables individuals with autism to become involved and feel like a part of their community.
  • Allows those with autism to participate in activities without social interactions that cause stress.

How Did Chess Help Children with Autism?

Dr Lilit Karapetyan, a Senior researcher at the Chess Research Institute of the Abovyan Armenian State Pedagogical University (ASPU), and Lecturer at the Department of Special Pedagogy and Psychology; shared the Armenian experience in chess lessons with students with an autistic spectrum disorder. They used unique chess tasks and lessons to develop speech and other cognitive processes and regulate the behaviour of children with ASD.

WIM Natalia Popova, Trainer at the FIDE Chess Academy in Belarus who has led a project in Minsk for the last two years, was the next one to share her experience. She stressed the positive impact that chess lessons had on the children, and how this progress was also acknowledged by the parents:

HOW CHILDREN WITH AUTISM BENEFITED FROM LEARNING CHESS

The first signs of positive results within the first three or four months. Children pronounced the words more clearly, were able to formulate their thoughts. The children that are non-verbal and have problems with hearing demonstrated the ability to answer simple questions. Last year, many children worked only in the presence of their parents. This year, most children work without their parents. Last year, several children demonstrated significant aggression. This year they have become less aggressive and show at least some control of their aggressive behaviour. They became more persistent. So within a year, their behaviour and overall interaction have improved.

HOW SMART KIDS CHESS TEACHES CHESS TO AUTISTIC CHILDREN

  1. Smart Kids Chess uses a simplified chess curriculum that relates to instruction and concepts from the Ontario, Canada; from the Elementary and Middle School Course Curriculum.
  2. We change our tone of speech: making sentences shorter, pause more often and get kids to interact in short intervals. (We do, they do and we repeat and they repeat).
  3. We use different memorization techniques during online teaching such as impactful visual images, auditory sound effects that are low in volume to not overstimulate but capture attention, and encouraging full body movements during online teaching to involve physical movement of the mouse, face, and arms.
  4. Working with very small groups to encourage facial behaviour mimicking while identifying feelings and encouraging social mindfulness of others within the small group.
  5. Smart Kids Chess makes classes dynamic, engaging, non-boring by introducing origin stories, history, mathematics, geometry, cause and effect, negotiation techniques, patterning and combining this with pop-in visual animation, sound effects, imagery, and exciting gamification of strategies.

OBSERVATIONS FROM TEACHING CHESS TO CHILDREN WITH ASD

Smart Kids Chess has helped children ages 6 to 12 years old with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) who’ve shown signs of unsafe behaviour, such as running away, aggression, self-aggression and inability to ask.

Over the past 5 years; both our instructors and parents of our ASD students recognized the following results from those children who took chess classes at Smart Kids Chess:

  • An improvement of both verbal and non-verbal communication skills,
  • Greater focus and curiosity towards chess and its activities, concepts, and appreciation of history, and etymology,
  • A heightened ability to observe, identify and understand orientation and spatial concepts,
  • Stronger cognitive processes from ASD students (example: attention and focus, improved memory, mindfulness and acuity, an greater awareness of cause and effect),
  • We’ve all noticed better behavior regulation against self-harm and less a sense of being overwhelmed,
  • Increased self-esteem, motivation and greater confidence in their own decision-making.

We also experienced that children without ASD also benefited behaviorally from the techniques we used with children with ASD.   We had chosen to break the game down into its most basic form, using many of the techniques above and created lessons that fully involved concepts they would understand at their grade level through incorporating concepts and lessons from their own school’s course curriculum and thereby directly relating the familiar (what they are learning in school) to the concepts and strategies of chess (the unfamiliar).  The results, as noted above, were further exemplified as improvements in areas of communication, focus, attention span, self-regulation, confidence and self assertiveness around decision making vastly improved not only in the game of chess but also within their daily school live as reported by parents.

We can only conclude that from our experience, if you or someone you know struggles with Autism, we would suggest that perhaps you give chess a chance at being a bridge to communicating with you child.

 

Written by: Andre Champagne
Andre is an accomplished Chess Instructor with over 20 years of experience teaching children chess.  Andre’s son also has ASD, and he has made it his mission to learn how to teach children with ASD the game of Chess. As a Chess Instructor, Andre taught over 200+ children with ASD the game of chess, how it is played and its intricate strategies.

 

For a free chess lesson from SmartKidsChess.com contact us at: 647-970-2242 or click on this link and sign-up for a FREE CHESS LESSON: https://smartkidschess.com/free-chess-lesson/

Resources:

FIDE, International Chess federation.  Article: How Can Chess Help Children with Autism?  Published April 1st. 2021
https://www.fide.com/news/1011

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