Harry Potter - Final Countdown

So sorry I've kept you waiting for a month for my next installment to this fantastic journey! We've been really trying to finish the book and just reading like crazy. The vocabulary work was all done. The comprehension questions were written up. The sketches were completed. And our writing piece is up on the wall.

We do this Snow Globe writing piece every year to help the students gain more practice with using sensory details and including tons of figurative language. They have to pretend they are stuck in a snow globe and figure out a way to escape. This year I just tweaked it a little and had them think if they were cursed into the globe and how could they use their wands as a means to get out. We studied spells such as these.

I need to get back to school in order to put up one of their writings for you later.

 

 

 

Our House Cup competition is over as well. We've been adding jelly beans to our House Cups. We counted them and then divided them equally among the House members And the winner is....

 

RAVENCLAW!



Our final two Potions lessons were completes. I really loved making the Forgetfulness Potion. It turned out to be a mix of water, veg oil, food coloring, and Alka-Seltzer. Which low and behold makes a kind of lava lamp. The kids were freaking out!

Here's a shot of our group making Mandrake Revitalizing Drought. This one was weird since it included Bat Dung (cocoa puffs).

 

 The best part of this whole EIGHT week unit came when I got the final exams (we were calling them N.E.W.T.S.- Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests). Every single child, all 20 of them, scored 91% or above. It was incredible. The whole test included simple recall, as well as some tough analytical ones. They had to write complete sentences which has proven hard to get them to do this year. But all of them managed to answer exceptionally well and scored Exceeds Expectations on their finals.

It made me so happy that they all got so much out of this book. If you want your own copy of this test, check it out here.