The Pokemon Reader

OK, bear with me on this.

When my son was 4, we had taught him his alphabet and gone through basic phonics with Bob books. He was ready to learn to read and was making good progress on some simple readers designed for first graders, but we weren't pushing him. Things like "See Jane run." were coming along just fine.

That summer, we purchased a Gameboy for my son, after much pleading. Included in the pack was a game called Pokemon. Thus began a painful odyssey in our lives as my son became engrossed in this electronic game. At first, I was a little concerned about this game: the player keeps an arsenal of imaginary creatures and unleashes them into a battle with other imaginary creatures like some sort of electronic cock-fight. It had trading cards to go along with it and he always wanted a new pack whenever we went to the store. There was a TV show every afternoon, plus weekend mornings... With the Cartoon Network, a Pokemon episode was always available. Worse yet, a full motion picture showed up which my son had to see with his parents. Like the TV shows, this was an excruciating romp through the same dumb plot, the same dumb protagonists and the same dumb catch lines. The only thing that changed were the silly names for the imaginary creatures.

Near the end of the summer, I noticed a sudden burst in my son's reading capacity. Very quickly, he was reading near the end of first grade level and has never looked back since. In fact, I had to stop picking out books for him to read because I was always underestimating him.

I asked him how he could read the books I was introducing to him, to which he replied: "these are easier to read than my Pokemon stuff."

Pokemon. A reading tool? When you think about it, there is a very powerful combination of forces at work here. The game is entertaining and interests the young mind. The screen is small which requires the text to be very simple and accessible to an early reader. The monsters are totally alien and are named with excellent phonetic methods: the reader can't cheat in sounding out the names of these imaginary creatures. The names are reinforced in the TV shows and the movies. The playing cards extend the amount of reading the player has to do and also require the player to use some math and critical thinking.

I'm not saying the creators of Pokemon had a powerful literacy strategy in mind when they came up with all this. I rather believe that the creators speak English as a second language (hence the simple and accurate use of phonics) and designed a series of products that worked well together for marketing effect.

But consider the nexus of technology, reading, entertainment and reinforcement that is Pokemon. I believe it was a major factor (certainly not the only factor) with my son's development of strong reading skills. What other methods could we use to bring such powerful forces together to help children learn?

-Dan Maas