The
sorting ceremony: after shopping, the kids assembled in the Leaky Cauldron for the sorting ceremony. C read the poem/song the sorting hat says/sings in the first book. We then had each child wear the sorting hat (birthday present), close their eyes and say the names of the four houses as they reached into a treasure chest full of Harry Potter house rings. The rings were meant for the tops of cupcakes and were found on amazon. Only one child had professed her loyalty to a certain house so I switched her ring out to be sure she was a ravenclaw. After the sorting they sat in their house groups and we had a short talk about the importance of going to all their classes ( the teacher in me) and I sent the Griffyndors and Slitherens to potions and kept the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs in divination upstairs.
Due to the timeline going wonky so early, I combined the charms and transfiguration classes with my divination class. The houses switched classes after about 20 minutes.
Divination: students were welcomed to divination with a short explanation of what it was and how it works (basically Prof Trelanny's speech in HP3). Then each child was given a cup of Witch's Truth Serum ( one liter sprite bottles with labels from OT) in a clear glass. They also took a divining straw (black coffee straws that I had dipped in food coloring and let dry several days ago). They then waved their wand over their cup(three times clockwise) placed the straw into the cup and stirred with the right hand to the right, took it out and flipped it over into the left hand and stirred three times to the left and magically their truth serum changed colors! In the potions book I had the breakdown of which colors meant which things (pink meant you would get bit by mosquitoes on the way home, green meant you would find a loose galleon on the ground, etc). Kids were amazed! They totally bought into it. One kid's truth serum did not change color and his neighbor told him he had the grim which brought on a collective gasp of shock from the others. But another concerned student suggested they try again and they did the experiment together reading the directions one step at a time and sure enough, he had missed a step and he was going to have a long and happy summer.
Transfiguration: I purchased some growing spiders and spider eggs from Hendley Market. When placed in water, they should grow. So I spread some pie plates full of water out and we practiced wand movement and the engorgio spell on the spiders. Unfortunately they did not grow very fast and even after a half hour I could not see a change in size. Bummer. We also created spiders from lollipops during this class. We covered a dumdum sucker with a piece of felt (brown,black or grey ) and added four short pipe cleaners to create legs and a couple of google eyes for effect. (All supplies fromHL) I should have known my audience and purchased more eyes. I had enough for two each with a few spares, but I am the science teacher and I have had several of the kids either in class or in Girl Scouts so when I passed out the google eyes, they put on 8- just to be anatomically correct!
Charms: I had planned for a separate charms time, but incorporated it into the other classes instead. I had the kids look up the charms we used in the other two classes in their books and then they practiced correct wand movement (I totally made this up along the way) for each spell. Some required a cursive and sign, some a capital cursive s. the last spell we learned was lummos. This is a direct flick of your wand to turn on the "flashlight" effect. This is when I realized I had missed a couple of chopsticks with the yellow paint. Kids figured out that to do nox (turn off your light) you could flip your chopstick around. Excellent.
Potions: for potions class, I hired two of my ex students to be prefects at the school. They came over an hour early and ran through their parts and set up all their supplies. Potions class took place under the house so we could hose it off if needed. Students were to make remylop (polymer spelled backwards- commonly referred to as goop in kid craft world) and a fizzywhizzer potion. I collected bottles of different shapes and sizes in the months prior and had all the ingredients labeled from the encyclopedia of potions. We had lots of extra ingredients that we would not be using just for effect. Beetle eyes (candy red hots), bundium secretions (beef jerky), gillyweed (green tissue paper), dragon toes (wooden scales), etc. The actual ingredients were mostly kitchen science- baking soda, vinegar (called witches tears) , lemon juice, water, ground up sweat tarts, yeast (doxy eggs), borax, etc. The girls gave the Prof Snape speech from HP1 about bottling fame and stopping death and then asked them questions about ingredients and the encyclopedia. The kids were then set free just like in the book to follow the directions. Both of the potions were in the encyclopedia ( the only two with complete instructions) and came with the incantations needed for each step. Because I used some classroom supplies, the kids had a morter and pestle to grind their own powders, a balance to mass dry powders on, graduated cylinders to measure liquids and droppers for adding just the tiniest amounts. The girls had some backup demos if needed due to time, yeast/sugar/warm water, alka seltzer/water, vinegar/baking soda.
