A Bit Of Magic: A Harry Potter Homeschooling Unit

We finally were able to get started on our last Harry Potter book today and after scouring the web last week we decided to turn it into a whole fun unit!

We have science experiments, writing assignments, and lots of yummy recipes to try out.  I also printed out quite a few worksheets, word searches, and trivia sheets off of the Scholastic Harry Potter page since I know the boys do enjoy worksheets too.

 I finally decided to treat our Harry Potter unit much like I treated our World War II study; as a little bit of extra fun, magic, and excitement sprinkled into our normal school days.

Today we made golden snitch candies and started learning some Astronomy (like Harry)

We had, what I hoped, was a fun trivia sheet about Harry Potter.

• Evan wasn't able to complete the page on his own since he couldn't read all the quotes himself.  The worksheet, which I found on Scholastic's Harry Potter page , dealt with the book the Chamber of Secrets.  
• There were 10 quotes from the book on the page and the boys had to remember/ determine who was speaking.  
• Once I started reading them out loud, Evan had no trouble with identifying the speaker and the boys had fun remembering the book and the movie.

We made golden snitch snacks today too.  had some white chocolate Lindt truffles and they just happened to be wrapped in gold paper.  Looking at all the different snitch crafts I was inspired; the boys loves truffles, they're gold balls, so all we had to do was glue some gold/ yellow wings on them and we had our very own golden snitches for snack today!

To make Snitch Snacks You will Need:

1. Lindt White Chocolate Truffles
2. low temp glue gun and glue sticks
3. yellow or gold feathers

I had each boy pick out two feathers they liked and gave them the option of trimming the feathers with scissors  if they so desired.  I then walked them each through the craft individually, teaching them how to safely use the glue gun without getting burned.

They each glued a yellow feather to the tufts of candy wrapper on either side of the Lindt truffle.  A super quick and easy craft!

They loved their snitches and Alec kept jumping off the furniture pretending that he was catching it.

And boy oh boy, they sure were yummy!

Golden snitch snacks 

We read chapter one at lunch and covered a bit of vocabulary.  It's the third time today I was aware that I was teaching vocabulary.  Usually the boys are content to figure out the meaning of the words in the context of the story.  Often one might ask what a word means but the others are quick to answer.  Today I had been asked by a few different boys to explain various words we've found in a variety of stories; of course I obliged!

 As our final Harry Potter type project we took a look at a book about constellations called Find the Constellations.  I told them we'd be doing a bit of astronomy this week since Harry learns about astronomy too and we were starting with the stars today.

My kids aren't that interested in space, the stars, and the planets so I'm always looking for ways to sneak to a bit of that into our studies.  They all smiled when I mentioned that Harry learns astronomy and just like that they were all interested in what we were doing.

We didn't read the whole book cover to cover but we went through a few of the constellations and talked about the grades of the stars, the names of the "biggies" in our solar system, and the fact that the stars are always moving around in our sky so they aren't always found in the same place throughout the year.

We learned that light-year is a measure of distance and talked about the speed of light, the speed of sound, and the distance of the stars to us & our planet.

 We talked a lot about perspective and why our sun seems so much bigger than all the other stars in our solar system. We compared our sun and the stars to a book we put on the table (near us) and the size that book would be if we put it down the road, past our neighbors house and tried to see it from our kitchen table.

We took a look at the different sky views shown in the back of the book and I asked the boys if they noticed that while the stars positions changed in the sky throughout the season did they also notice that they don't change much in position to one another?

I told them if they studied how all the constellations were laid out based on the north star and the big dipper they only ever had to find the big dipper and then they could follow their way out and find all the other constellations.

They thought that was pretty neat.

They reminded me of the night we went camping in our backyard and spent time really looking at the stars and constellations.  We were all stunned to realize that it was three years ago!