Half birthday with Harry Potter, part 2

I'm back after a fun but exhausting weekend throwing our Harry Potter party for eleven kids ages 7-10.

Guests selected wands from an assortment we'd made from wood "candle cups" and dowel rods from JoAnn Fabric that my husband tapered using a wood rasp and sandpaper, then stained various shades of brown.

Gold paper bags with each child's name in calligraphy were at the ready to be decorated with a themed sticker. The kids could take home all their party creations plus wand in the bags.

We sorted the group into two houses--Gryffindor and Ravenclaw. My daughter wanted to be a Ravenclaw like Luna Lovegood, one of her favorite characters from the series.

The two houses competed against each other in the transfiguration game I described in my previous post. They then rotated between two other classes I'll describe below.

Care of Magical Creatures

The children made their own pygmy puffs by making yarn pom poms and decorating them with googly eyes and felt scraps for ears, feet, fangs, antlers and what have you. They then named them and got to describe to the group their puff's special abilities or magical powers.

The ones in the photo my daughter made with paper or felt eyes instead of googly eyes. I recommend the sticker-back type googly eyes for best results, available at JoAnn Fabrics.

Potions

We transformed our kitchen into a potions lab! Using old glass jars--from spices, preserves, syrup, vinegar, we scrubbed off old labels (Goof off helps remove adhesive) and relabeled them as potions or potion ingredients.

There are loads of printable labels if you check in Google images. Finding potion-looking contents for the jars was pretty fun too. Ginger root become bubotubers, rye flour became slug repellant, dish soap became Erumpent fluid. You get the idea. I think one of the more gross/cool items we had on hand was a jar full of dried sardines from a Japanese former boarder. No need to label them!

Potions activities

Wave jars
I prepped a bunch of old baby food jars, cleaning the label glue off the glass and spay painting the lids with some old car touch-up paint we had on hand.

The children filled the bottom of the jars with tiny seashells and festive confetti that's heavy enough to sink in water. We then filled the jars 1/3 of the way with water and added food coloring. Not many kids wanted blue waves for some reason.

Next, we topped off the solution with baby oil, leaving some headspace to create motion. Kids could mix glitter into to the oil layer. (Our pre-test showed it tended to get trapped between layers if you added it to the water).

Secure the lids tightly and tip the jars to make waves. If carefully shaken, the solution would make bubbles that would reseparate into layers if allowed to rest.

Slime

I found a very easy recipe for homemade play-slime that uses white glue, borax (a laundry booster), water and food coloring. Unfortunately the proportions weren't that precise, so a few kids had to start from scratch when the slime didn't set up properly. Therefore, I won't post a link to the recipe I used. But if you google "borax slime," you'll find directions. I recommend directions that enable you to make small portions in paper cups. This is easiest to manage with groups of kids. I had no major messes working with six kids at a time.

This was probably the most popular activity of the day. Lots of oohs and ahhs as the colored, diluted school glue became a rubbery fun toy by simply adding a little borax solution.

For more Potter Party ideas, see Harry Potter Guide and Cookbook.

What Hogwarts classes do you think muggles could approximate?

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Half-birthday with Harry Potter, part 1

The countdown begins to my daughter's 9.5 birthday party on Saturday. We are having a total blast preparing for it. I thought I'd share a little about what I've been up to.

Invitations

We sent the invitations a month ahead: a customized "Hogwarts acceptance letter," inviting the children to attend an orientation session (and half-birthday party), signed by headmistress Minerva McGonagall. I used fonts downloaded from MuggleNet, a line drawing of the Hogwarts crest, and printed the letters on parchment paper from AC Moore (also available at office supply stores in their stationery department).

Games

I visited dozens of websites looking for age-appropriate games before I hit the motherlode: Potter Parties. I was blown away at how many great ideas are on this site--including games that 8- to 10-year-olds won't consider babyish. Another goodie: Harry Potter Party Guide. Here are the four ideas we plan to use:

Hogwarts Word Search

Using an online puzzle creator, HERE, I whipped up a 26-clue word-search puzzle in about ten minutes. You can set the puzzle size (mine is 20 characters square) and enter all the words to be hidden within it. You can also set the difficulty level (in other words, for younger kids than mine, you might not want any of the hidden words backwards on a diagonal). The puzzle creator algorithm will also filter to prevent any bad language from accidentally being created. So no worries of secret F-bombs in your puzzle. It generated a plain text puzzle I copied and pasted into Word, adjusted the font size and printed onto parchment. It also generated a solution page I could print and have on hand to determine a winner.

Hogwarts Alphaspell

Players must come up with a word from the Harry Potter world for each letter of the alphabet. I created a puzzle sheet for this game, and filled in one example, "Xenophilius Lovegood" for X.

In Word, I set up a two-column page, then typed up each letter of the alphabet in Hogwarts Wizard font (downloaded from MuggleNet) with a blank line behind it. You get the most uniform results using a right-aligned tab and a "leader." To do this, put a tab after each letter and select all. Go to the paragraph menu in Word, click the "tabs" button on the bottom. In the Tabs menu, I chose 3" for my tab location (because of the two columns), chose right alignment and option 4 (underlining) for my leader character. Click "OK" and voila, perfect blanks to fill in.

Pass the Quaffle

This is a Hogwarts spin on "hot potato." The children sit in a circle and pass around a rubber ball (we found a perfect small, red kickball at Dollar Tree) while music plays. I expect we'll put together a playlist of Wizard Rock songs for this purpose. Whoever is holding the quaffle when the music stops is eliminated, until all but one child is out.

Transfiguration (sculpt-ionary)

This is Hogwarts riff on Pictionary. You'll need a game board of some kind, a die, a one-minute timer, playdough and game cards with wizarding-world words on them. Split into two teams--Gryffindor vs. Ravenclaw, for example. Roll to see which team goes first. One player will draw a card and "transfigure" the dough into the shape on the card, while her teammates try to guess what the object is. If the team guesses correctly within the time, they roll again and the next player from the team sculpts. If not, the opposing team resumes play. Whichever team gets to the end of the gameboard first wins.

I'll be back tomorrow with details about our two "classes" and a little about the menu.

Have you ever thrown a theme party? Which of these games sound fun to you?

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