The big reveal of the plotting and planning.

Today was the day that the thing that K & M have been preparing and planning for over a month finally happened.  They had wanted to hold it at home, but I suggested that the Asfordby group would be a better place, since they do a lot of Harry Potter-ing with friends there and they agreed after a bit of persuasion.

A month or so ago, K & M started making lots and lots of pink and purple quick and easy pompoms (they do it round a piece of card and cut first, but the same idea).  Then I kept finding smallish squares of paper all over the house and told K & M I'd throw them away if I found any more, they kept them tidier after that!  As you may know, if you've been following my blog for a while, we've made quite a lot of wands.  A couple of weeks ago, K & M pooled some of their money and bought some chocolate that you can mould from our local toy shop, like this.  They also made some paper plate owls.  The result was a Harry Potter sale!

They added stickers for eyes to make Pygmy Puffs.

With the chocolate, they made chocolate frogs and I bought a mould and made some more to go with them.  The squares of paper I'd found lying all over the place were chocolate frog cards that they'd been making to go with the chocolate frogs.

The wands and the price list K made.

With the merchandise prepared, there was quite a lot of debate about the prices and eventually they agreed with spare chocolate frog card at 3 knuts up to 1 galleon, 2 sickles and 10 knuts for a wand.  We decided on an exchange rate of £1 to a galleon, 20p to a sickle and 1p to a knut.  M wrote out a list of everything we had and I wrote on the prices, then K typed it up to make a poster.

Finally they decided that they wanted some sort of decoration, so they decided on a scene from The Chamber of Secrets. 

K did the writing and M & I added some 'drips'.

We set this up with some help from K's Tabby Kitten, who played the part of the petrified Mrs Norris.

M went along with her magical eye and added some scars to her face (red felt tip) to be Mad-Eye Moody and their friend, C, went dressed up as her usual character Bellatrix Lestrange.

All of this has been planned by K & M and it went really well.  I had talked to K & M about the idea of a float for change and they dealt with most of the money by themselves.  I'd warned folks to bring their wizard money and some had even made some to use!  Before taking into account what K & M spent (the biggest thing was the moulding chocolate - everything else was crafty things we have in the house except the wand making materials which I don't mind having paid for), they have made over £15, which they are planning on splitting three ways and giving the third share to charity.

Although the theme for Asfordby was originally James & the Giant Peach, as quite a number of those who go had also been to see it at the theatre, E, who runs it was quite happy for it to be Harry Potter too.  As she put it 'you might as well go with the flow', since most of the children over about 6 and some younger all play Harry Potter for much of the time we're there anyway!  And C had prepared a Harry Potter quiz, which K & M brought home to do.  There were also various James and the Giant Peach themed activities, including a bug sudoku, which K did when she saw me sitting down having a go, making glow worms (mini glow sticks in balloons - we're planning on finding out how glow sticks work tomorrow), a ladybird life cycle activity and making 'hot noodles made with poodles' (quote from the Centipede's song) pictures on paper plates using cooked spaghetti covered in paint!

In other news, this afternoon we talked about prime numbers and with just a little bit of prompting K worked out what a prime is and we also talked about how it's very easy to rule lots of numbers out of being prime (even numbers, when the digits add up to a multiple of three).  We also related this back to fractions and how it can be useful when simplifying them, for example if there are prime number top and bottom you definitely can't simplify.

Yesterday, quite randomly when M wanted to watch even more Tom & Jerry, I suggested we do something else and when she couldn't think of anything I suggested I could give her some dictation, like in Anne of Green Gables and was quite surprised when she agreed.  I dictated a simple story about Mr Fox, a favourite puppet toy who the girls play with with Daddy and was pretty impressed how well she did, spelling 'friend' correctly for example.  None of the mistakes were such that you would not have been able to understand the word and when we went through it she was able to correct the majority of them herself.

Finally, we've got some dried peas soaking overnight in readiness for making Peas Pottage like we saw at Mary Arden's Farm recently.