It was so wonderful to meet many of you today at the Open House! We had a wild and wonderful last day here in the Harry Potter-verse.

To start the day, we did an icebreaker where we composed Daily Prophet (the wizarding world’s newspaper) articles and shared them with the class.

We continued with a video analysis exercise where we looked at the opening scenes from the first, fourth, and last Harry Potter films, paying particular attention to the use of light and darkness, music, thematic changes, and character depiction as the films, books, actors, and characters aged.

We spent a good portion of the day finishing our research projects to prepare them for presentation to the class during SAVY PotterCon. Despite some technical challenges–which, to look on the bright side, provided a more authentic introduction to the world of research–we managed to see presentations up on our big screen. The projects and presentations were amazing! The students did a fabulous job describing their questions, rationales for choosing this topic, their methods, their findings, and the significance of their work. I was particularly impressed by the way the teams conveyed nuance and ambiguity in their data–a hard thing for even seasoned researchers to do!

Some students chose to do blackout poetry, journaling, or continuing work on their projects in the afternoon. We used pages from an old copy of a Harry Potter novel to create our own poetry by marking out words. The remaining words formed poems that they read to the class (if they wanted to share). We had spoken yesterday about how libraries “weed” their collections to free up space for new materials, so I think that made ripping up and repurposing a beloved book a bit easier to stomach!

We then snacked and celebrated our accomplishments for the week, welcomed parents, and tried out the green screen and photo booth. (If you took a green screen photo, SAVY administration will email you a copy next week!)

I cannot say enough how much of a joy it was to get to know each and every student in this class–this was my first time teaching with SAVY, and they really gave me a fabulous introduction to the program! I hope they also enjoyed the week and came away with deeper understandings of critical themes in Harry Potter. Have a wonderful weekend!

Sarah

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