Harry Potter Book Night

My son and his group of friends are all Harry Potter mad at the moment which pleases me and his bestie’s mum Esther no end as we love the books ourselves and are enjoying re-reading them with our little wannabe wizards. When we both independently sent off for a free Harry Potter Book Night event kit and started discussing all the great ideas in it, we couldn’t resist organising a HP Book Night event together. With our sons’ friends and their siblings, we had ten children aged between 5 and 8 years old at the party. Some ideas came from or were inspired by the kit and some were of our own creation. My children helped make some of the decorations too which they loved doing!

A Letter from Hogwarts

The mums were all sworn to secrecy until the children received their ‘letter from Hogwarts’ - the invites were handed out to the mums who then all placed them on the doormat on the same morning, as though delivered by owl overnight (I was tempted to leave some bird poo and a dead mouse on the doorstep to add to the authenticity but decided this may be a step too far…). The envelopes were addressed in the style of Harry’s ‘The Cupboard Under the Stairs’ letters - ‘The Bedroom with the Glittery Carpet’, ‘The House with the Noisy Drums’ etc. There was much excitement that morning, my favourite reaction was “It’s at Ollie’s house!! Do you think his mum knows?’ Gorgeous! The event kit had an invite template which we photocopied and the envelopes were stuck with a book night sticker, also courtesy of the kit.

Book Night Activities

The plan was to spend 90 minutes doing activities and then watch the whole of the Prisoner of Azkaban whilst eating their tea (whilst the two 5 year old girls watched a Disney film in another room - as much as they love playing wizards, they are too young to watch 'real life' dementors just yet!) which left us the option of stopping the film before the end if we ran over with the activities - which was handy because we ran nearly an hour over!! Who knew decorating a bookmark could take so long?! Here are the activities we did;

Be a journalist for The Daily Prophet

I found a front cover image of ‘The Daily Prophet’ online and my husband with his Indesign skills blanked out the bottom article. Each child got a sheet to complete however they thought best - we had pictures, articles about out of control spiders and adverts for joke shops and new broomsticks, there was some great imagination on display!

The Sorting

  

The event kit suggested the fab idea of sorting the guests by cake! I injected cupcakes with coloured buttercream using a piping tool - red, yellow, green or blue - then covered the top with white buttercream to hide the piping hole and topped with some Harry Potter toppers from eBay. When they bit into their cake, the colour would tell them their house. To avoid any upset, I put icing lightning bolts on five of the cakes and told the mums in advance to take these ones - the green Slytherin cakes were all within these, much to the children’s amusement! 

We served the cakes up with Pensieve Punch, the recipe is available here. It looked good but most of the kids didn’t enjoy the fizzy pineapple flavour, they all gave it a try though!

Design a Crest

 

Each child had a piece of paper and a choice of two styles of crest template to draw around. They then got busy with the felt tip pens designing their own crests for their Hogwarts house or their own wizarding school. They could choose any design they liked but a lot of them drew what was important to them in their crest - family, football, teddy bears and of course Harry Potter characters.

The Search for Gringotts Gold

     

 

Four rooms in the house became the house common rooms with a couple of simple props for each plus the odd HP poster or picture stuck up - each room had a poster made by my son with the house crest on it and then we added a picture of the fat lady portrait to the Gryffindor common room door, a few toy snakes to the Slytherin common room, a portrait of Helga Hufflepuff drawn by my son above the fireplace in the Hufflepuff common room and a starry ceiling in the Ravenclaw common room (a black towel covered in yellow paper stars). I was planning to do a roaring fire in the Gryffindor common room too with a torch and some orange tissue paper but sadly ran out of time.

The children were split into four teams and given a treasure hunt sheet per team. The sheet told them which order to move around the common rooms and how many coins they were looking for in each room. Each galleon or sickle had a letter on, they needed to write the letters on their sheet and then work out each of the four words. The rules were to move around the common rooms in the order on the sheet (each sheet was in a different order) and to leave the coins where they were for the next team to find. Once they’d worked out all four words they received a chocolate galleon each.

Decorate a Bookmark

Each child had a pre-cut bookmark to decorate with pens, crayons and stickers (Poundland had a book of 800 Harry Potter stickers for £2). We used a hole punch to attach a tassel at the bottom too (£2 for 10 tassels from eBay)

OWLs

A Harry Potter quiz in predetermined teams so that the younger children had an older child to help them! There was some questions and answers provided in the event kit but we came up with our own to avoid spoilers, as most of the children hadn’t yet read the last three books.

A Trip to Hogsmeade

After they had finished their OWLs, the witches and wizards were rewarded with a trip to Hogsmeade (AKA my kitchen!). There was butter beer available in The Three Broomsticks (chocolate milk topped with squirty cream) and a wide array of sweet treats in Honeydukes - chocolate snitches (ferrero rocher with paper wings sellotaped to them), magic wands, Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans, Basilisks (jelly snakes), Weasley twins (Haribo Jelly Baby Double Trouble - if you’ve not come across them, they’re jelly babies holding hands so they come in twos!) and chocolate frogs (the official ones are so expensive! I spent £2 on a silicone mould from eBay and £1 on a big bar of store-own chocolate and made 10 frogs from it). This was a definite highlight and one little wizard was adamant his frog nearly jumped off his plate!

The Lego Challenge

Each team picked out a piece of paper which told them a part of Hogwarts to build using Lego and/or magnetic tiles, with a couple of spare sheets in case anyone finished quickly or wanted to swap - the options were the Great Hall, the Owlery tower, the Entrance Hall and courtyard, the Forbidden Forest, the quidditch pitch or to decorate the black lake. They then put all their creations together in our tuff tray to make Hogwarts! (see my page Tuff trays & Messy play for more ideas on how to use a tuff tray at home) They really enjoyed getting creative without the usual Lego instructions and ready-planned kits! A great wind-down activity before settling down for tea and a film, whilst the mums collapsed with a glass of prosecco and the leftover chocolate snitches!

Decorations - Turning my House into Hogwarts

 

The event kit contained a HP Book Night poster which we put up by the front door and hung a plastic bat from Halloween outside. My entrance hall was the school library, with pictures on the wall of the seven HP books drawn by my son and a couple of cardboard boxes used to make a spell book and The Monster Book of Monsters. 

The dining room was the Great Hall - my daughter and I painted a starry ceiling on a couple of pieces of paper which could’ve done with being about 10x the size but my five year old was very happy that she contributed to the decor! There was a great idea in the event kit to make floating candles by painting empty toilet rolls white, putting an LED tea light in the top and stringing them across the room. This was more fiddly than expected and had to be hung up at the last minute as the tea lights all needed to be turned on first but it did look great and added to the atmosphere. We also hung some stars made from glow in the dark Hama beads from the ceiling light for the enchanted ceiling. The living room and three bedrooms were the common rooms as mentioned previously and we even had a moaning myrtle emerging from the toilet in the bathroom!

Extra Touches

The well-known Harry Potter theme tune was playing as they entered the Great Hall for their first activity, there’s plenty of HP playlists available via Spotify/Apple Music etc, this really added to the atmosphere.

At the end of the party, each child got a party bag with their Hogwarts name on (Phoebe Granger, Arlo Malfoy etc). There was a certificate of attendance in the event kit to photocopy so each child got a personalised certificate in their bag. They also got a door hanger to colour in at home with the house crest selected by their sorting cake on it (again photocopied from the event kit). All the crafts they made went in their bags plus all the leftover sweets from Honeydukes and the leftover stickers from the event kit were divvied up.

This is one of the cheapest parties I have organised and also one of the most well-received so you really don’t need to spend a fortune for a successful party. The decorations were very clearly home-made but the children could identify them as HP-related and this made them effective. Other than the food and drinks, very little money was spent. Items such as tea lights for the floating candles and mason jars for the butter beer were loaned from the other mums and my son loved drawing all the posters for his beloved Hogwarts!

Credits to Esther my co-party planner, fellow mum Helen for the loan of Myrtle & some other HP decorations and mums Catherine & Ali for their help on the night - see my blog post ‘Things I’ve Learnt’ for the importance of sharing the load with fellow muggles!