Movie Night - Harry Potter

We watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone this weekend, but these ideas can be used for really any of the HP movies.

Food:
We decided to have a stromboli basilisk (this would be awesome while watching Chamber of Secrets) with a cauldron of marinara dipping sauce,

pumpkin pasties,

and Butterbeer.  We honestly were trying to keep our budget low, so instead of getting all the ingredients for this recipe, we just got some cream soda and printed out this great label.  Next time I really want to make the butterbeer recipe, though.

There are a ton of great food ideas.  Just pick anything from the books/movies!  Chocolate frogs, Bernie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, pumpkin juice, etc, etc.  They feast over there in the Wizarding world!

Decorations:
I found signs and banners at Just Sweet and Simple.

I tried to make our dining room table look like it belongs in the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom or Snape's office.

Activities: 


We sorted ourselves into houses!  Well, maybe not Ashlyn since she's a little young to really understand the questions, but hubby and I did.  :)  There are a million "Which Harry Potter house are you in?" quizzes, but the one we took was here.  I got sorted into Hufflepuff (I guessed that's where I'd go) and hubby was sorted into Gryffindor (not really a surprise there, either)!

We made wands using this tutorial.  I ran out of glue sticks and we couldn't completely finish them this night, but I went ahead and got more the following day so we could finish up.  This picture actually isn't completely done.  We still needed to paint the glue so it didn't look exactly like, you know, glue.  ;)  Plus I only have a low-heat glue gun.  It seems to me that a lot of this would work better with higher temps since the glue wouldn't set pretty much right away.  But that doesn't matter... these were a lot of fun to make and I highly recommend doing this.  :)

Ashlyn couldn't help with the hot glue, but she had fun painting hers and, of course, playing with it!

I've seen other fun activities for Harry Potter nights that I will love to do when Ashlyn is a bit older.  You can have potions class and mix together different things, have an herbology class (though I'm not really sure what to do there lol  It would be fun to think of something, though), or make wizard's hats.  There are lots of possibilities!

This was Ashlyn's first real introduction to Harry Potter.  I'm happy to say that she loved it.  :)


Moving closer to Halloween, what kid-friendly Halloween movies would you like to see done?