Harry Potter Unit-- Aragog's Web and Bubble Tea

We're looking at finishing up our Harry Potter unit over the next few days.

It's been a lot of fun and I'm so thankful for Pinterest and all the ideas I found!  We've had a great time combining our traditional schoolwork with some fun Harry Potter themed activities, crafts, and treats.  

Today we're playing a fun sight word game, mixing up some bubble tea to drink, and reading more of our Harry Potter books. 

Evan played a sight word game using Aragog's Web:

He had to escape from Aragog's web by feeding him sight words instead.  I had set up a masking tape web in one of our doorways and put a few sticky note sight word cards nearby.  He had to read the word and then the plan was to ball them up and throw them into the web.  Only balling up the paper made the words so small that they sailed right through the gaps in the tape! Oops!

Throwing the paper while it was flat or folded in half made it float softly down to the ground.... so Evan decided to just put the words in the web.

He still thought it was great fun and told me if he couldn't read all of the words he was going to be stuck in the forbidden forest.  When the last word was stuck in the web we ducked under it and ran away to safety.

It was a lot of fun and it only took minutes to set up.

The words we worked with for today 

The web 

Filling it up! 

I had a whole page of Harry Potter journal ideas that I had printed off the computer: 

So,  obviously, they all picked the exact same topic to write about today for their writing assignment.

They each wrote about what animagus they would turn into.

Ian wrote all about being a bald eagle and what he would do once he was a bald eagle.

Evan chose to write one sentence.  Not a great story but since it's the first full sentence I have EVER gotten him to write I was pleased.  He sounded out all the words on his own and used a fancy "a" like the one on the suggestion sheet and, for some reason, misspelled is but hey, at least he finally wrote something.

Alec wrote about the similarities between an ocelot and himself since that's the animal he'd turn into.
They all had fun and Alec even drew a whole forest scene to go with his story.

It's amazing how willingly they write when it's a topic they're excited about!

With all their morning work done the boys and I set out to make a potion.  

We used tapioca pearls to make some fruity bubble tea; though we called it Magic Bubble Tea. It's magical because the bubbles don't pop.

We followed the recipe and used "special magic" to make the pearls (boiling water in the microwave).  While waiting the 20 minutes for them to soak in the hot water we settled down to read Dragons.

The dried pearls 

sitting in the hot water 

adding the Jell-O 

Our fruity bubble tea 

Evan thought it was pretty good and told me
it tasted just like Jell-O 

We settled down to eat, drink and read another chapter in Harry Potter.

The boys played with the left over pearls for a bit (though I did rinse them off and drain them out in the strainer).  They thought they felt squishy and weird.  We compared the finished pearls with what we had started with and noticed that they were brighter, softer, and a bit larger.