Wizard Shops & More – An Amazing Harry Potter Party

WIZARDING PARTY SERIES: A TOUR OF WIZARD SHOPS AND CLASSROOMS

Welcome to Part 2 of our Wizarding Party Series (because yes, this theme was a constant for a very long time, birthday after birthday 🙂 ).  While we did pull some of the menu ideas from our previous party, we varied the games completely.  For this party, we focused on a classroom setting and built the games and activities around what you’d typically see in a Harry Potter or Wizard class!

Try out a few of these suggestions below and let us know how it goes and what you think!

DECOR

We had a Gryffindor fan as our birthday girl, so we used a gold and red color scheme: red table cloths and napkins, gold plates and cups, etc..  

ARRIVAL

Most guests will trickle in a few minutes before or after the actual start time of the party.  To keep everyone in theme, have a few activities in an area of the party. 

We had a few things for the kids to do while they arrived.  There were a few picture opportunities – we actually did buy the sorting hat and the quidditch broom, which they played around with for a bit.  Next to the sorting hat, we also had a tablet on one of the sorting quizzes to see which house they were in (but of course, we let them pick if they didn’t like what they got from the quiz).  We also had a Platform 9 ¾ sign which was home-drawn on a large poster board. 

We also had a craft table set up that kept a few kids – and adults – busy (see below). 

CRAFTS

We had a few harry potter coloring books (Harry Potter Coloring Book) and print outs with some crayons on the table as well as an origami book with a handful of origami paper (Harry Potter Origami).  

There are also quite a few crafts listed on the wizardworld site: Crafting Magic (wizardworld.com) in case you need more ideas.  

FOOD & DRINKS

There are quite a few Harry Potter cookbooks out there, so if you’d like to follow some recipes, go ahead and grab some!   Otherwise, you can always ‘re-name’ some typical foods to make them sound more in tune with the wizard world.  We printed the labels on antique style paper to add to the decor. 

Note: we did repeat most of these menu items from our last Harry Potter / Wizard Party.  You can find links here to different games and activities:  Harry Potter / Wizard Parties

• Appetizers
  • Herbology Bites – we used a super simple recipe from justsweetandsimple.blogspot.com: Herbology Bites (justsweetandsimple.blogspot.com)
  • Hogs Head Cornish Balls – Cookbooks may give you some recipes from scratch but we used regular old meatballs and just added a nice little label 🙂 
  • Felix Felicis Spinach Dip – we cheated here too and just labeled regular spinach dip as “Felix Felicis Spinach Dip”
• Main
  • In the wizard movies, there always seems to be a massive feast with tons of food: chicken drumsticks, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes, roasts, fresh bread.  We decided to keep with that theme for this party. 
• Desert
  • Cockroach clusters – store bought turtle chocolates
  • Moonstone cookies – dark brown chocolate cookies
  • Olivander’s Wands – big pretzel sticks 
  • Treacle Tarts – mini pecan or jam bites
  • Rock cakes – mini chocolate muffins
  • Cupcakes w/ toppers
  • Pensieve – silver bowl w/ blue jello
  • Golden Snitches – Ferrero Rocher truffles to fill the Triwizard Cup
  • And of course…!! Hagrid’s Birthday Cake from the first movie, complete with pink frosting and misspelling
• Drinks
  • Liquid Luck – Label any of your drinks “liquid luck”
  • Butterbeer – if you’re brave or have a sweet tooth, butterbeer recipes can be found all over the internet, but we found our guests didn’t like the sweetness. 

GAMES

Since we had a younger crowd, we had more of a “tour” of wizarding world shops and classes where the kids would have an easy activity at each stop. 

• The first part of our ‘tour’ was to pass through the  9 ¾ platform so that we could give the kids everything they needed for school. (“Shops” were really just tables set up with a few things that the kids could pick from).  Note – if you have a bag for them, it will be easier for them to carry their items.
  • Gringotts Bank – here we gave the kids a few chocolate coins and told them they could keep these. 
  • Flourish & Botts – at this “book store”, we gave them printouts of potions/spells
  • Olivanders Wand Shop – for the younger crowd, we had store-bought wants (Wizard Wands).  But for the craftier bunch, we let the kids ‘create’ their wand by using a pipe cleaner core (white for unicorn hair, red for phoenix feature, etc..) and wrap it around with brown pipe cleaners for the wood.  They were definitely less sturdy but they had fun creating their own. 
  • Apothecary – this is the potion shop.  This was more of a snack spot for the kids.  We let them pick “Ingredients” to snack on for later (or at that time if their parents allowed).
    • Blood worms (gummy worms)
    • Dried beetles (raisins)
    • Blind cat eyes (M&Ms)
    • Hippogriff gizzards (marshmallows)
    • Dried sardines (goldfish crackers)
    • Bezoars (peanuts)
    • Sneezewort cakes (Chex cereal)
    • Toad livers (mini pretzel twists)
  • Honey Dukes Sweet Shop – this the candy shop.  We had a chocolate frog and some regular jelly beans separated in bowls.  The kids were allowed to pick a few. 
  • 2^nd Hand Broomsticks.  We found some really cool broomstick pens on Amazon and let the kids pick which ones they wanted (Harry Potter Broomstick Pens & Geddes Witches Broomstick Pens). 
  • Herbology – this is the plant shop.  We let each kid pick out a mini pot (Mini Terra Cotta Pots) and let them decorate it.  We had markers but also let them make finger print lady bugs and bumblebees. .
  • Owl Post – this is the stationary and post office shop.  We had journals that they could put together.  We purchased some DIY Journal as an extra activity for the kids but if you’ve got smaller ones, you may just want to have some notepads or make some notebooks beforehand.  We also had some features and pencils for them to create some quills: Make Your Own Hogwarts Style Paper Quills (wizardingworld.com)  
• Platform 9 ¾ and the trip to Hogwarts.  Next, we told the kids they had to get through Platform 9 ¾ and on the train to get to the Wizard school.
  • Our platform 9 ¾ was really just a doorway with a sign but we did have grandiose ideas on filling this with streamers so it seemed more fun…. Maybe another time 🙂 
  • Once they got into this room, there was an easy train puzzle (Melissa and Doug Train Sound Puzzle) for them to do as a group.  The puzzle made train sounds so it was especially fun for the little ones. 
• Wizard School
  • Quidditch PItch.  First stop – the quidditch field!   While we can’t really fly on broomsticks, we did have yellow hula hoops (from the dollar store) and small foam balls.  The kids had to try to get the balls through the hoops.  After everyone had a turn and they were ready to move on, we gave them a ‘snitch’ (Ferrero Rocher truffles)
  • Potions Lab.  By the time the little ones have moved around a bit, it’s likely they’ll be a little thirsty.  We used small water bottles and relabelled them with silly ingredients like: “Dragon Saliva”, “Troll Tears”, “Water from Lake Agua”, etc…  Then we had powdered koolaid in small clear bowls also with silly ingredient labels: “crushed red flowers”, “powdered mermaid water”, etc..  Then we let the kids create their own koolaid “potion” mixtures
  • Finally, we led them to the decorated table where we had the “Feast”. 

GOODIE BAGS

If you want to keep in theme when you’re guests leave, sprinkle in some wizard items for their goodie bag along with any of the regular candy or hand outs you want to give out. 

We used small gold gift bags with red tissue paper as the goodie bag to keep with the color scheme.  We added in some wizard rings, fake wands, mini ‘edible’ wands (snack pretzel stick packets), and opted for regular jelly beans this time around.