A Day at Hogwarts Birthday Party Activities

I was really excited to plan Hogwarts class activities.  I did a lot of searching online and saw a lot of cute ideas.  I took some inspiration from some of those ideas and did some tweaking.  Some of the ideas I came up with on my own as I thought about the age group we'd have at the party and after consulting with my daughter (she was my Harry Potter expert for books 1-5 anyway).  It was fun to brainstorm ideas for different classes.

Our class schedule:
Transfiguration
Potions
Divination (for the 2nd years ie the kids able to read) / Pin the Sock on Dobby (for the 1st years)
Defense Against the Dark Arts
and after the feast we had a movie (Harry Potter 1) presented by the History of Magic department

Transfiguration

For Transfiguration we gave all of the kids a lump of model magic clay to transfigure into an animal or other item of their choice.

Potions

 Potions class was held in the Dungeon (the basement).  Our potions master, my husband, demonstrated some "potions magic" with a wizard science kit from the craft store.

the Divination Tower

For Divination, I prepared a madlib fortune activity.  We even held that class up in the "tower" (the landing at the top of the stairs).   The kids ended up needing a lot of help with this activity.  It would have been fun to read all of the fortunes to everyone, but we ran out of time.
This activity took a lot longer than the activity for the younger kids, unfortunately.

For the younger kids that I didn't think would be able to do the madlib activity, I printed out a large picture of Dobby the house elf for a pin the sock on Dobby game.  The baby socks were cute and I didn't have to make them!


My original plan for Defense against the Dark Arts class was to have a pinata.  I tried to make one, but ran out of time for it to dry, so I improvised.  We practiced "defensive spells" instead.  The kids loved practicing "expelliarmus" and disarming me.  I had them line up and take turns, and when they said, "expelliarmus!" I'd make my wand go flying out of my hand.

A few of the kids were interested in watching the movie at the end of the party.  The rest preferred to play with toys.  We obviously didn't get through the whole movie.

Other class ideas I thought could have been fun included:
Care of Magical creatures- either finding dragon eggs, or trying to "hatch" dragon eggs- ice in the shape of an egg with a small toy dragon frozen inside.  Kind of like the baby shower game where the first plastic baby to be "born" (out of melted ice) wins.
Herbology- planting a seed to take home
Quiddich practice- trying to throw balls through hula hoops while "flying" brooms, and/or find the hidden snitch
Muggle studies- trying to come up with funny ideas of uses for mundane "muggle" items

party prep
foods post