Pokemon and Spelling?

My eight-year-old son is obsessed with Pokemon trading cards. (In case you do not know what they are, Pokemon cards are a collectible card game started in 1996 in Japan.) My son loves to trade the cards with friends and studies them late in to the night. I truly do not understand his fascination. The cards that seem to cost a fair amount of money as you are lured in to buying pack after pack to attain the "best" cards. This means you end up purchasing a lot of not so great cards in search of the elusive top cards.

I could not believe it when my son hopped in to my car last week and told me that his Pokemon cards had really helped him on his spelling test. I was dumbfounded that these cards had any educational value and asked him how these Japanese cards had helped him on his English spelling test. He proudly informed me that several of the harder words on the test were similar to the names on his Pokemon cards. He was thrilled that his Pokemon habit had helped him at school. He also knew that I would most likely be happy to buy him a few more packs of cards as they now could be deemed educational!