My kiddos knew that I was running a themed camp this week, but I’d asked their mum not to tell them what the theme would be. Instead, I kpet them indoors until everything was ready to go, and when I led them into the outdoor camp space, they found a little owl on the table with letters for each of them. I just re-wrote the Hogwarts letter from book 1 to suit my needs.

Next, we chose our houses. I’d had a backup activity planned to prevent drama over who would be in which house, but luckily, they all happily chose different houses, so we were good to go with B7 as Hufflepuff, G5 as Gryffindor, and G2 as Slytherin. I showed them the jars and bead stash for house points, and let them start with 5 each. We came back to this throughout the week. They earned points for winning games, doing their best work on projects, or doing something unusually nice or thoughtful, and lost points for poor behaviour.

Up next was making wands. I had collected suitable sticks and scattered them around a little grove of trees in the local park. I also made a bowtruckle out of pipe cleaners and some fake leaves I had lying around. I introduced them to Pickett and explained that bowtruckles only live in trees that feel magical, and he would help us be able to tell which sticks would be good wand-wood. (This gave me an easy out when G2 grabbed what was essentially a dried out 4-foot long bush - Pickett just said it wasn’t magical!) We walked to the local park and found our sticks. Pickett would let the kids know when they had something that was wand wood, and also (speaking through me) let them know that they could keep looking until they found one that felt “powerful.” (Idk, it seemed like a good idea to draw out the activity and make it so they didn’t feel forced to stick with the first thing they picked up.) Anyways, it worked pretty well, and we took the sticks back home to turn into wands. I gave them each a bit of clay to turn into a handle, and then let them choose their “core” - red feathers for phoenix feathers, white ribbon for unicorn hair, and red embroidery floss for dragon heartstring. We put those on the inside of the handles so they were completely contained. G2 enjoyed using the leftover core options to decorate the outside of her wand.

Something that was important to start early in the week was our sorcerer’s stones - after all, we had to grow them ourselves! I pre-made the supersaturated sugar solution (which I called “elixir,”) but had them roll the lollipop sticks in sugar and mix in the food coloring until they were happy with the shade.

Once our sorcerer’s stones were safely out of the way to grow, we made troll bogies. I used a no-cook playdough recipe (the usual cream of tartar recipe, but with a smaller amount of boiling water instead of cooking it on the stove) and let them choose which colours to mix in to create a lovely greenish yellow booger colour. Once it was ready, we chose slips of paper from a jar and tried to build what it said using our troll bogies.

Our last activity of the morning was “pin the scar on Harry Potter.” I couldn’t believe how much they enjoyed this one - mostly I think they enjoyed winning house points (whoever got it the closest, or two points if you got it exactly right) but they also had a great time making adjustments to their strategy, using other landmarks (the sides of the poster or the previously stuck scars) to get a better sense of direction. I added other outlines around the outside so it would double as a giant coloring page.