![]() ![]() My coworker initially used (the much lighter and usually cheaper) Styrofoam balls instead of golf balls, but the spray paint dissolved the Styrofoam! Hence, a last-minute Facebook plea for used golf balls! I think they look like giant chocolate truffles, actually. …instead of flying after them, visitors made their own Snitches using feathers, glue dots, and gold-painted golf balls. And as for Snitch-seeking… Very Simple Muggle Quidditch I hitched three hula-hoops to a rack, brought out a squishy foam ball for a quaffle, a couple even squishier dodge balls for bludgers, and a short broom for only the keeper’s use, because otherwise things might end up a little too chaotic for indoors. I devoted the other end of the meeting room to a very simple Muggle Quidditch pitch. And although we hadn’t used the tie template Kelly linked to, I did use the Harry glasses template on the same page to add a couple pairs to Madame Malkin’s shop. The “Have You Seen This Wizard?” photo booth was another of my coworker’s babies which had also happened to be in Kelly’s post, but we tied it in with the sign for Madame Malkin’s Robes and laid out a lot of funny costumes we had in the storage room. The results got pretty creative that way, anyway. But we still had hundreds of chopsticks, so I compromised, by letting visitors wrap their feathers, hair (yarn), or heartstring (chenille stems) to the chopstick base with colored masking tape. When I found an awesome wand tutorial that suggested stuffing PVC pipe with phoenix feathers, unicorn hair, or dragon heartstring, I knew that’s what I wanted. Besides, we wanted the activities to be as hands-on-for-kids as possible. We had hundreds of chopsticks, and there are plenty of online tutorials on making wands out of chopsticks, but they all involve paint and hot glue, neither of which is conducive to an unmanned station at a large library program. Then visitors could take a trip through our large double meeting room, labeled Diagon Alley thanks in part to a nice collection of signs I found at the blog One Creative Mommy. I suspect my coworker of being a GeekMom reader without telling me, because she contributed everything in Kelly’s post that we used, like the floating candles in the Great Hall (though I did see those a few other places!): Floating Candles in the Great Hall We took another cue from Kelly’s post by putting a house tie coloring table across from the Sorting Hat, but mostly because we already had a stack of posterboard coloring ties from an Oriental Trading Father’s Day activity. ![]() Making the hat actually talk was out of our skill/budget range, though, so guests were sorted by pulling a house crest out of a bucket, the templates of which we got right here on GeekMom. She also built a Sorting Hat out of a small sunhat and paper mache- cloth mache, actually. So almost immediately she started building a potted mandrake (which didn’t turn out) and a large cardboard Hogwarts Express (which did, see above), before I’d managed to pull any concrete plans together myself. ![]() This year’s theme, “On Your Mark, Get Set, Read,” just didn’t offer the same decorating opportunities. Last year, when the Collaborative Summer Reading Program theme was “Heroes,” she’d put up a butcher-paper city skyline in the hall with a cardboard Batmobile kids could pretend to drive for photo ops. I pitched my plan to my coworkers, and the head of Summer Reading Camp grabbed on joyfully. Even better! Our library is closed on Sundays, so we’d have to have our party on Saturday the 30th, a little too early for anyone to actually check out our embargoed copies of Cursed Child… but not too early for excitement. But then it turned out the script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was slated for release this day, too. That seemed like a decent excuse for a celebration. This year is, in the timeline of the books, the 25th anniversary of Harry’s 11th birthday, the day he finally got his Hogwarts letter. I’d always wanted to host a full-blown Harry Potter party, and when my library director challenged me to come up with a completely new program (outside of my regular Family Night storytimes and Lego Club) this year, I looked at July 31 and started doing the math.
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