Explore chess
How the pieces move
One rule each, in one line. Put a piece anywhere on the board and watch what it can reach change.
Tap any square to put the piece there and watch the pattern change.
Pawn
Forward one square. Never backwards, ever.
It takes diagonally, which is the thing everybody gets wrong first. From its starting row it may go two.
The red circles are where the pawn could take a piece. It cannot move to those squares otherwise, and it cannot take the piece straight in front of it. This one rule causes more confusion in a first lesson than everything else put together.
1 square from e4. A knight in the middle reaches eight, a knight in the corner reaches two. That is worth trying.
The order these are taught in matters
A first session that introduces all six pieces produces six children who remember none of them. In an Infants group one piece gets a whole week, with a story, a game and nothing else on the board. The queen comes last, because a child who meets the queen first stops paying attention to everything else.