Celebrating Multiple Literacies with Harry Potter
The secret to any good celebration is I to involve as many students as possible and to give them genuine responsibilities and encouragement to be creative. Literacy celebrations offer students, and teachers, the opportunity to have fun and show off what they have learned during their deeper exploration of various literacy studies. I have had Harry Potter celebrations in English classes with students ranging in age from 12 to 30. The level of sophistication in college classes was Tag Heuer Replica different from that in the middle school, but across the spectrum students have found the celebrations fun and worthwhile.
You can find lots of ideas on the Internet for organizing fan conferences and special author events, but for school celebrations, the Harry Potter books are ideal because they are of interest to both males and females. And the fact that they are set in a school—even one quite different from ours— makes it easy to involve students and create interesting related activities.
An alternative for sorting students is to go online and look for fan-based websites that provide quizzes that can be used to divide students. A fairly simple one is “An Intelligent Harry Potter House Sorting Quiz”, while a more complex one is “Find Your Hogwarts House”. The latter poses 122 questions that participants answer by ranking their position on a nine-point scale. If you have access to a computer lab you can easily complete it in class; otherwise, have students complete it at home and print off their “answer” page.
Another idea for sorting is to identify a specialty for each of the four houses and let students choose which they wish to join. For example, one house can be The Artists, another The Entrepreneurs, another The Scholars, and the fourth The Chefs and Baristas. In this system, each house would be responsible for one pre-event contribution and for approximately eight minutes of entertainment at the party. For example, The Artists would be responsible for decorating the room and at the party for providing a sketching table and/or a wand-making table. The Entrepreneurs would plan the finances and the prizes and also figure out a fair distribution of responsibilities. At the party they could direct their fellow students in designing and marketing Tag Heuer Replica Watches a new magical product. The Scholars could collect Harry Potter items for a hands-on trivia contest, while at the party they could sponsor a Lord Volde-mort’s Name Game (see below), or they could be the judges and the ones who total the scores and decide who gets the prizes. The Chefs and Baristas would be in charge of food and drinks, but they might also sponsor a recipe contest with points given for names as memorable as Rowling’s “Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans” or the Weasley twins’ “Puking Pastilles” and “Ton Tongue Toffee.”
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