Selecting Prefects and House Décor
Once everyone has been sorted, a prefect for each house must be assigned or elected. At Hogwarts, prefects are chosen by the faculty and are usually students who have exhibited exceptional grades and a mature sense of responsibility. If you are appointing the prefects, you might want to go through some kind of a process—maybe a quiz based on the books or on proposals that students make for the event. The four prefects become the planning committee.
At the first meeting of the planning committee, I introduce the timeline and explain the amount of class time we will have for our Harry Potter Day. After offering a few, brief ideas, I shut my mouth and let the students plan. I take notes on their discussion and keep my suggestions to small nudges away from ideas that are infeasible due to cost or time. The students never fail to impress me with their Tag Heuer Replica Watches creativity. For my most recent Hogwarts feast, the students came up with their idea of the four basic food groups: (1) Sweets: candy, cookies, and cakes; (2) Crunchies: chips and dips plus pretzels and nuts; (3) Liquids: juice, soda, and ice; and (4) Paper Goods: plates, napkins, and cups. Each house was put in charge of one food group, and the prefects were responsible for getting their house members to sign up to bring creatively named or decorated items.
In addition, each house was responsible for creating a house banner. They could replicate banners from the books or movies or create their own version, but they had to remain faithful to house colors (Gryffindor: red and gold; Slytherin: green and silver; Raven claw: blue and bronze; Hufflepuff: yellow and black). I’ve always said costumes were optional, but it’s surprising how many students want to whip something out of their backpack and amaze everyone. Most costume shops have witch’s robes for sale, but I would rather recycle old graduation gowns. Thanks to donations from friends, I now have one for each prefect.
Students also like to create identifying marks for their house—a pin, a badge, or a scarf. In the middle school, several students—males and females—spent lunch times in my classroom learning to knit scarves in their house colors. The pattern is the two house colors repeated in rows as narrow or as Tag Heuer Replica wide as each student prefers. In my college class, one of the prefects, a graduating senior now attending medical school, wore his graduation robe along with a striped Harry Potter tie that he had made. The women in the class didn’t know whether to be more impressed by the magic tricks he performed at the party or by the fact that he had made his tie.