Educational Pokémon
My 6 year old daughter E and 5 year old son C are in their Pokemon phase. They love to watch the TV shows and luckily for me, they also like to read the books. When they get some TV time, they always choose to watch Pokemon. When they go to the bookstore or library, they are always looking for Pokemon books. In my mind, the books balance out the TV watching (at least that’s what I constantly remind myself of).
I hadn’t realized that Pokemon is crazy now. Beyond the original 151 that I grew up with, there are now over one thousand Pokemon along with mega/gigantamax evolutions (how is that even fair in a Pokemon battle?). It’s a lot to keep track of, but my kids love it and try to soak it all up. Since they are obsessed about Pokemon, it has pushed them to read more and more complex things. They have to sound out some crazy sounding Pokemon (can you even pronounce Rhyperior at a glance if you didn’t know what Pokemon is?!). There is some good there!
One night, my kids wanted me to read a Pokemon encyclopedia. It didn’t have much to read other than names and stats. E and C wanted to just look at the pictures and ask me to read the names. I decided to take it a step further and teach them how to interpret the stats. This is where i talked about the imperial vs. metric system and how we can use stats to learn more about the Pokemon. We can also see how they compare against each other. It was hard for them to grasp, but I wanted to start early!
We also talked a bit about science with what type is super effective against what type. Plants drink water, so that’s also translatable to Pokemon. So is grounding electricity. It starts to get more funky with normal types being super effective against ghost since that isn’t real science, but we didn’t get there! They were just interested in learning real world things here and there while exploring each new Pokemon.
At the end of the night, we wrapped up and I felt good about the time we spent doing that. It was good bonding time and we got to be silly and learn at the same time. If we keep stacking days like this, it’ll get easier for when they actually have to learn about stats and science. That’s my hope and we get to do it through Pokemon, which is fine by me!
