On to book 5, the Order of the Phoenix. The books get increasingly dark, and I found as I was planning it was a little harder to line up the days with our activities. But, I think I've given a good enough effort. Today, my favorite activity was our Ministry Memos.
We had some lessons to get through first before we got to our activities today.
Our quote of the day from the Order of the Phoenix: "We've all got both light and dark inside of us, what matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are" - Albus Dumbledore
No Howlers in our owl mail this morning! (We're actually thinking of keeping owl mail around a little longer than Harry Potter week)
Our first lesson today was Defense Against the Dark Arts (Otherwise known as Math). We headed outside, because you don't just want spells flying around the house.
So Asa, our Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher for the day, stood on the end of our sidewalk, and the boys walked all the way down to the other side of ours, just before the neighbors drive-way.
Asa fired spells (math problems) at them. They had four seconds to defend themselves, and send back a spell (give the right answer) to stun their teacher (take one sidewalk step forward toward Asa), if they weren't successful, or were too slow, they were stunned (and didn't get to take a step forward).
It was pretty funny to watch actually.
They 'won' and successfully defended themselves against the dark arts, when they made it all the way to their teacher. (My camera batteries died, so I didn't get the end, but Calib finished first)
Instead of Muggle Studies today, we had Astronomy (a class Hogwarts students actually do have to take!). The boys worked on their lap board for the planet of their choosing which goes along with their lessons by dad this week- and is due before their next lessons by dad.
We did a quick herbology, checked on our Mandrakes, and decided we should cut the longer flowers shorter to see if it would have any effect on some of the flowers that weren't yet turning colors.
Then we went outside for a potions lesson.Today we were growing snakes (think those little snakes you can buy for the fourth of July) You need three parts powdered basilisk skin (powdered sugar), and one part horn of bicorn (baking soda). You mix that in a cup and turn the cup upside down in the bowl. Then you pour some dragon drool (rubbing alcohol) around it. Remove the cup, and set fire to the dragon drool.
And you get all kinds of snakes growing from it!
Notice everyone warming themselves around it.
It was super cold (by Florida/my standards today) and sadly I hear it's more of the same tomorrow. At least I have a couple of pairs of slipper socks now (Yay Christmas presents!)
We did check on our crystals again today. I think they might be done growing, but we're going to wait until tomorrow to pull them out of their solutions for good.
We had a couple of fun activities today, too.
We made some invisible ink maps/letters. We just drew on some white paper with some white crayon, and then used water colors to paint over them, and it reveals the crayon.
I should have had the boys press harder with the crayons, it wasn't as successful as I hoped.
Then we got to our Ministry Memos. A big shout out to Asa for helping me figure out how I needed to print out these pictures so I could get them to look right when they were folded.
Once folded, we had some fun paper airplanes!
And then there were messages flying everywhere.
Nobody sent Hayden one, so I sent him one telling him how good he did on his pop quiz yesterday.
Dinner tonight was Mrs. Weasley's Bangers and Mash. (Fun story: the term bangers comes from war times of rationing food when sausages would be filled with extra water, and pop in the fire-- making a *bang*) And they were awesome.
Peyton tried to conduct a spell that would make the dishes do themselves, but it didn't seem to work.
Does anyone else's cat have a fascination with pipe cleaners? Mine FLIP OUT about them. Maybel has discovered my craft drawers in the back of my closet, and will go back there looking for them. Sometimes I give up and let her have some, and the boys always twist them into one big toy she LOVES.
And since it was cold, and rainy, and I'm not feeling 100 percent, I had a nice cuddle buddy for the couch today.
Our last activity was playing 'Things Who Must Not Be Named". It was like a Harry Potter taboo. You had to get everyone to guess who you were talking about, but without using certain words.
No pop quiz tonight, which allowed Asa to (finally) bring the house cup home to Slytherin. They boys were not too happy about this, but pretty good sports anyway. I'll give them a big pop quiz tomorrow.
Next Up: And the Half-Blood Prince
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