Classroom Activities
The first activity should be a crowd pleaser for the students. Before the beginning of the unit, I will feature some Pokémon books in my classroom library to help all students acquire background knowledge. There are many of these books available in reading level 1 and 2 from Scholastic books. I will have Pokémon cards and Pokémon Go available for use during recess. I will also feature books on dinosaurs, birds, and whales.
In the first class period students will have scraps of paper and I will give them one minute to write down all the different Pokémon characters they know. After writing a name they will place the paper in the center of their table group. When finished, students will sort the papers according to their own criteria. I will suggest that Pokémon who evolve from other Pokémon should be a way that they could sort, but they are free to sort by color, fighting style, etc. We will look at how students have sorted their identified Pokémon and I will write on the board some of the Pokémon “family trees”. We will discuss what evolving a Pokémon means in the context of the Pokémon universe and how does a Pokémon get to the next level. The “experts” in the class will lead the way. We will find the appropriate cards and see how the Pokémon evolve and what it takes to evolve them. Is it something internal such as age or something external such as experience or possession of certain items? Using cards, books, and prior knowledge, students will draw their favorite Pokémon and write about the changes that take place when it evolves.
Another activity we will do will help students understand adaptation and why there is a vast array of life on earth. Using Mr. Potato Head, we will talk about how we can change him. We can’t add extra arms or feet; we can only put different appendages in the holes that he has. When we look at the pieces he comes with, can any of those help him adapt to a new environment? What if his habitat became covered in water, what might be a useful adaptation that would help him survive? Could he grow fins? How about flippers? Gills? Why or why not? What if we had another scenario where there were dangerous predators that walked on the ground and swam in the water, what adaptations could he have that would help him survive? Could wings sprout from his back? How could they evolve? Did everyone’s potato evolve the same way? Is there only one adaptation the potato could have to help him survive or could there be more than one? Could he evolve to fly or, instead, evolve to climb trees to survive? We will take a paper doll of a potato-like creature and add features to it that will help it survive in different scenarios. Is there more than one way to adapt to survive? Students will choose a scenario, adapt their potato to survive in it, and write about their ideas. Finally, we will compare how and why their potato adapted as compared to what Pokémon undergo. Do Pokémon adapt to survive? How is their evolution different?
Another activity will help students understand that evolution does not happen all at one time, and instead that it takes many generations to occur. We will look out of the window and discuss what we know about birds. I will then show the video from the American Museum of Natural History that shows the transition from dinosaur to birds (see resource section). We will talk about what we know about birds and dinosaurs, what is the same and what is different. Due to our students’ limited knowledge, I would not expect to have much information in the “same” category. So how is it possible that birds evolved from dinosaurs? We will access the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition “Dinosaurs Among Us” online and read about and see illustrations of how birds evolved from dinosaurs (see reference section). We will talk about transitional forms and about how it took millions of years for theropods to evolve into the birds we see today. If possible, I will ask the art teacher (or someone else with artistic skills I do not possess) to draw how a theropod dinosaur could evolve into a bird including three or four transitional forms. Students, in pairs, will then sort the forms from dinosaur to bird deciding which transitional form goes where on the continuum and citing a reason for their placement of it. How would each transitional form help the organisms to survive? These artistic renderings are only to help students to understand that the change from arms to wings and other adaptations such as a toothed beak to toothless one do not occur in an individual or in just one generation but rather that they take many generations to occur.
Our culminating activity comes back to Pokémon and evolution. Students should now understand that what Pokémon do is not true evolution. Students will discuss why their change is not evolution. If Pokémon were to evolve, what would need to happen? Students will choose their favorite Pokémon or another organism and create a scenario as to how the environment has changed. Students will then draw a picture of how their creature has evolved to adapt to its environment. They will write about how the adaptation(s) help it survive. Students will then draw two transitional forms that show how their creature has evolved over time.
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