Harry Potter themed school year - give me your ideas!

May 8, 2018 4:01 AM

Our elementary school is going to have a Harry Potter theme throughout the next school year, focusing on the first Harry Potter book. What different elements from the wizarding universe can we incorporate into the day-to-day life of the school?

The entire school is participating. We have already come up with the following ideas:

- Sorting the students into the four houses and assigning prefects (who will act as class delegates and change throughout the year) with a points system for the houses
- Having monthly Quidditch matches during PE and/or recess, with a final house match with the entire school at the end of the year
- Naming and decorating each classroom after a certain location from the books (so far we've come up with King's Cross station, Diagon Alley, Hagrid's Hut, and Gringotts Bank).

What other magical elements are we missing? :)

posted by Blissful to Education (15 answers total)

You need a little laminated cutout of Peeves that moves around every week, peeking out from the tops of lockers, hiding behind a stack of trays in the lunch room, etc. Silly places.

You can also do the same thing with a snitch. Hide a snitch once a week (maybe once a month?), kid who finds the snitch earns their house 50 points.

Hot glue, brown paint, and a bit of glitter will turn an ordinary pencil into a magic wand.

Send messages classroom to classroom by owl.

Each house should have a common room (homeroom?) with their colors.

Other classroom themes: forbidden forest, chamber of secrets, cupboard under the stairs, great hall (do stuff to the ceiling).

If you can put your hands on one of those giant chess sets, this is the year to do it.
posted by phunniemee at 4:38 AM on May 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

End of year challenge/tasks?
posted by raccoon409 at 5:00 AM on May 8, 2018

Floating candles are easy to make (clear string/fishing wire, a white cardboard tube or just rolled paper, electronic fire)
posted by Jacen at 5:21 AM on May 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

My church did this last summer for the religious exploration classes. There were portraits of people hung up all over, with printouts of fancy frames. One of the bathrooms had a Moaning Myrtle in it. Lots of kids running around with capes and wands (sticks picked up from outside and decorated) . Oh, and scarves of the house colors draped all over too.

Maybe include ButterBeer with any classroom celebrations? Have the Weird Sisters perform on holiday occasions? I also see lots of led candles all over.
posted by Fig at 5:25 AM on May 8, 2018

If you have any sort of Student of the Week/Month Awards, those notifications should come during lunch, and be delivered by a stuffed owl suspended with fishing line from the end of a long stick that a teacher is carrying.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:51 AM on May 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

Shelter In Place drills would be less terrifying if they were done with a troll wandering the halls rather than a possible shooter.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 6:03 AM on May 8, 2018 [5 favorites]

Could you consider coming up with your own four houses rather than the ones from the Harry Potter books? I think there might be a lot of baggage with, say, assigning a fifth grader to Slytherin, or even Griffindor, especially if they don't get the nuances of the later books / overall themes - and they're first-through-fifth graders, so they might not get all the nuances.

Maybe name them after permutations of the names of local animals or mythical beasts, trees, little plants - kids need a little connection to nature, and some of those little plants have stories.
posted by amtho at 6:35 AM on May 8, 2018 [14 favorites]

Some version of the Triwizard Tournament but crossed with an age-appropriate version of Academic Decathlon? You could do a problem-solving/puzzle task, a math task, and a speech/spelling/writing task. Each classroom holds a tournament and celebrates each in-category winner and then, if your school has multiple sections/classrooms for each grade level, the overall winner from each class does a final event with the other grade level winners -- all for House points, of course!

Not sure if your school does uniforms or not, but regardless, you may want to have a contingency plan in place if some kids start getting over-the-top with themed gear or accessories, so kids who can't afford lots of merch don't feel left out. If there's a budget for it, maybe provide a 'uniform' of sorts (everyone gets a simple wand, a House tie, a lapel pin) and ask that kids refrain from going much beyond that?
posted by halation at 7:09 AM on May 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

I agree with changing the names of the houses, honestly. The books treat it very simplistically and Slytherin are by and large perceived as the antagonists for most of the series. If kids could self-select their houses that would be one thing (but then you'd probably have like four Hufflepuffs to every 100 Gryffindors) but being assigned to the "bad guys" might not be great for elementary school aged children.

I went to a British school and we had houses named after famous British people: Drake, Darwin and Austen. You could do a similar thing for your area? Any notable characters? Or just have a school wide contest to invent four wizards/magical creatures/magical plants to name the houses after.
posted by lydhre at 7:26 AM on May 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

Yes, just to say about the houses: I was at a one day event that did this. There were 7 and 8 year old girls *crying* that they had been put in Slytherin and a bunch of outraged parents demanding they get switched to Ravenclaw. Don't go there.
posted by flourpot at 7:55 AM on May 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

The houses at the school where I teach are simply named for former heads of the school. Something like that might be wise.
posted by blaneyphoto at 8:18 AM on May 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

Agree on changing the names of the houses - and the books give you a clear rationale for this. You can frame it as: we're not Hogwarts, we're another school in the wizarding world (like the other houses that come to compete in the Triwizard Tournament). So our houses are different -- say, Eagle house, Dragon house, Lion house etc.
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:34 AM on May 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

Nthing "change the houses", but if you still want to stay in the Potterverse you could use the four houses from the North American Wizard School. A cursory look seems to suggest that there isn't a "bad house" with the kind of bad rap Slytherin has.

Ooh, here's a fun idea - it would take a little extra work for someone, I grant, but how about some "letters" to kids from various Hogwarts folk, as a sort of "pen pal letter exchange"? You know, a class picks a Hogwarts student to write a letter to, and then they write and "send them" via Owl (maybe make a "mailbox" decorated like an owl or something), and then a couple weeks later, they get a letter back from Harry or Ginny or whoever.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:08 AM on May 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

For clarification of the pen pal exchange, I mean that each kid in the class picks a Hogwarts pen pal and gets their own letter back. Maybe only do a couple of exchanges of letters.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:10 AM on May 8, 2018

For the Quidditch part, it has become really popular on college campuses. It might be fun to get some local team members to come and help teach them the rules and strategies. My son played in college and now plays for a local team and he and his friends would think it was great to do this to build interest. They have done it for a middle school where a friend teaches and at a HP Festival too.
posted by maxg94 at 5:43 PM on May 8, 2018 [1 favorite]