Learning chess as an adult

This year, our younger daughter joined the chess club at school.  Both our girls like to play chess sometimes, and as I wrote here a few years ago, it's a great game to play for improving your mind and all sorts of skills!

Since joining the chess club and participating in a few tournaments, I think our daughter's interest in chess is waning.  She sometimes comes out of the 'lessons' saying it was boring - which means really that she didn't understand what was going on. It does appear that some of the teachers are better at explaining things than others, but when she has a 'boring' lesson, it really does put her off wanting to play chess.

Personally I've never really enjoyed playing chess, but I always try to encourage our kids in whatever they do, and do things with them so they get plenty of practice, improve and so enjoy doing them more. 

Everyone enjoys doing things more when they are better at them!

So, seeing our daughter's interest in chess waning, I decided that I'd try to play chess with her to try and encourage her some more. I don't want our kids to just give up on things they find tricky, so me learning chess will hopefully set a good example!

We've got books out of the library to help. The very basic book is for me..

Plenty of pictures and simple explanations!

Then a slightly more advanced, but still a kids book for my daughter (she's 9):

So - let's see how we go. My daughter is happy to teach me as we play - hopefully this will help her understand the moves more as she explains them. I also hope this will pick her interest back up in the game.

How do you encourage your kids to stick at something if you yourself aren't interested in it?  Have you ever learnt to play a game or sport to encourage your kids to play?