HPSC: Week 5, History of Magic

Week Five:  June 26-30

This week was History of Magic week.  This was a difficult week to plan.  There is not a whole lot of Harry Potter History of Magic type stuff that can be done so I looked at it from the point of view of the History of Magic in real life.

Bug-A-Boo has this great series of books that she got a few birthday's ago.  It is the Wizardology series.  I decided to look through that and see what I could find that could be turned into some fun camp activities.  As I read I found a lot of information on Wizard codes and other codes used throughout history.

Sydney loves to break codes so I thought this would be fun for us.

DAY 1

Unfortunately, there is no Daily Prophet this week.  Our trusty reporter was pretty busy and missed her deadline.  Oh well, we should be back to our regular publishing schedule next week.

The first thing we did was talk about the house ghosts at Hogwarts and we learned a little about their backgrounds.  Then we were going to use our worksheet to create our own house ghost.  This proved to be challenging and we still have not finished the worksheet.

After talking about House Ghosts we learned about the 7 different kinds of codes:  Pig Latin, Hieroglyphics, Bi-Literarie alphabet, Polybius's Cypher, Morse Code, Sigillum Mysteriorum and Mary Queen of Scot's code.

One of the fun things in the Wizardology books is that there was a hidden code written in the margins of each chapter.  We went through the book and deciphered the code.

DAY 2

Today we are working on writing and deciphering codes as well as working on our Girl Scout Junior Scribe Badge.  Step #1 of the Scribe Badge is Start with a Poem.  We wrote a haiku in a code of our choice and then we each had to decode each others haiku.

Bug-a-Boo's haiku

My haiku

DAY 3

A few years ago, when I made Bug-A-Boo her Harry Potter birthday trunk I found several Harry Potter science kits on amazon.  I bought all that I could find and we hadn't gotten around to using them yet so this summer camp was going to be the perfect opportunity to finally do that.

For History of Magic I chose the Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets Spells & Potions Science Activity Kit-Sounds of Hogwarts.  We worked on the Flight of the Salamander, Straw Kazoo and the Howler experiments and unfortunately none of them worked very well.  It was extremely disappointing but we hope the others are better.

DAY 4

Today we played our Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit game and we watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix while working on our Hogwarts Latch hook rug.  We also wrote our limericks today which completed Step #1 of the Scribe Badge.

Bug-a-Boo's Limerick:
There once was a boy named Neville.
He met quite a devil.
Her name was Bellatrix.
On his parents she put quite the fix.
In her defeat he will revel.

My Limerick:
There once was a boy named Harry.
His childhood was extremely scary.
But then all that changed,
It was all prearranged,
and at Hogwarts his life was merry.

After writing our limericks we hopped in the car and headed to the Be Amazing Magic Shop or for our camp purposes Weasley's Wizard Wheezes.  The Be Amazing Magic Shop is located at 80 N. Hamilton Rd. in Gahanna.  We had no idea what to expect.

This is definitely a shop for "professional" magicians and Sydney was a little disappointed at first.  Then the man behind the counter started talking to her and showed her a couple of tricks and she loved it.  We bought a few inexpensive tricks and she had a fun time showing Grandma and Grandpa.

DAY 5

Today is Field Trip day.  Since there is no place that depicts the History of Magic I thought we could learn about the History of Ohio.  We visited the Ohio History Center and Ohio Village.  We had a lot of fun at the Ohio Village.

In order to finish Step 2 of the Girl Scout Junior Scribe badge Bug-a-Boo wrote a 5 page short story about a little robot on an adventure.  It was really very good.

Next week...Astronomy