Adapting Pokemon Go for kindergarten classes

Many of your kindergarten kids may be coming in brimming with excitement about Pokemon Go after spending their weekends hanging out with obsessed siblings and carers. It can be a good chance to liven up your learning routines with some new and fun items. 

Tasty Pokeballs

If you have some kids who are not eager eaters in your care, you can use a Pokeball theme on their meals and snacks. You can use a melon baller to create fruit and vegetable balls as snacks. For main meals, you can create meat balls of different minces. You may find that a normally 'boring' meal of pasta and mince with cut up fruits takes on a new life when it becomes Pokemon themed. You can even make the balls worth different points in an eating competition so less popular items like brussel sprouts are more exciting to eat. 

A Pokemon hunt

You can create your own Pokemon hunt by hiding cut out Pokemon figures around the centre. You can hide them in different toy sets and different locations each day. It's a fun way to encourage kids to explore less used toys and resources. For more advanced hunts, you can create mud maps for the kids to explore the yard and uncover different clues, leading to a treasure at the end of a Pokemon scene or a fun new toy to share with the class. You can also have fun facts about each Pokemon in the hunt for them to learn. 

Make your own Pokemon

One of the cool aspects of Pokemon is that they can combine to create hybrids of two or more Pokemon. This can be a great start for an arts and craft project, where you combine different animal parts and robot parts. You could try a 2D option with shapes made from different colours and textures of paper, as well as 3D options made from recycled materials such as paper rolls and tissue boxes. You can help the children to develop creativity as well as vocabulary through this exercise, as they learn to describe which parts they chose for their Pokemon and why they chose them.

If you are finding your kindergarten class is a little Poke-crazy, you can easily use this as a starting point to help them explore many educational outcomes including reading maps and diagrams, inventing new Pokemon through arts and crafts as well as encouraging them to eat a varied and interesting diet.