Harry Potter Book Club

A while back our library had a Harry Potter book club for tweens, where we read through the entire series. Several different families expressed a desire for a book club for a younger audience, so this school year that's our aim!

 Since this is with a younger crowd, I didn't want to discourage anyone so instead of reading the series, we're choosing different wizarding world elements and discussing them. For instance, for our first meeting, instead of talking about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone we just talked about Hogwarts Castle. Next month we're talking about Hogwarts Professor's and classes.

HOGWARTS HOUSE SORTING
The first order of business in any Harry Potter Book Club is sorting the kids into different houses.
Our group was sorting by choosing a cupcake, each filled with a small spot of different food coloring: red for Gryffindor, blue for Ravenclaw, yellow for Hufflepuff and green for Slytherin.

If you look up "Sorting House Cupcakes" on Pinterest, you'll find other bloggers who have done this. I can't take credit for this idea.

For the toppers, I printed off Sorting Hats on Publisher, cut them out and glued them together with a toothpick in the middle.

Remember to print off equal amount of mirror imaged Sorting Hats so when you put wrong sides together, they match. 

Once individuals are sorted, they each get a house badge to wear and keep. 

REJECTED HOUSE SORTING IDEA
One sorting idea I was playing around with was a quiz.

 The idea behind this quiz was, besides your standard school supplies you had to choose 5 things to take with you to Hogwarts. What would you pick?

Kids would choose 5 different items from this list. Each item was assigned one specific house, which I had a master key of what object was assigned where.

Where ever the majority of the chosen items were from would determine what house you were in.

Here's a PDF to the quiz and answer sheet.

Ultimately, I felt like this didn't have the umpth I wanted for a sorting activity.

Maybe you can find a use for it!


HOUSE CUP POINTS

Throughout the duration of book club, we keep up with house points on our chart.

If you come to book club, you earn your house 1 house point.

If you wear your badge to book club, you earn your house 1 more house point.

House points can also be earned through other little things throughout the meeting.

At the end of the year, whichever house has the most house points wins a special prize!

HOGWARTS CASTLE QUIZ

Because we were discussing Hogwarts Castle for this meeting, we decided to test the group to see who could name the most rooms inside the Castle.

We split off into groups and they were given 5 minutes to come up with as many different rooms as they could.

I was fully expecting someone's list to read:

Gryffindor Common Room
Gryffindor 1st year boy dorms
Gryffindor 1st year girl dorms
Gryffindor 2nd year boy dorms
Gryffindor 2nd year girl dorms
Gryffindor 3rd year boy dorms
Gryffindor 3rd year boy dorms

And so on and so on, but no one did it!

OWL CRAFT

Our craft idea came from Amanda at A few Shortcuts. I wanted to do something super simple since it was out first meeting.

Check out her blog post for the video on how to make this adorable owl!!




Let me know how your book club goes!