A New School Year

    Well, today was our first day of the 2019-2020 school year.  We don't officially start our Hogwarts Homeschool for another week, as we use our first week for review and covering our outlines and just getting back into the swing of school "routine".  It was a great day though.  I was able to get the Hogwarts House Crest Banner done that I was working on a couple days ago so it could hang on our barren wall.  I think it turned out pretty well.

    Along with the normal review for the everyday subjects, we learned a bit about Harry Potter's author, J.K. Rowling and for art did our first beginner's wand.  (I have other wand making projects on our list to do over the school year, but this one seemed like a simple easy project to begin with.)  We basically followed instructions from Instructables Living that you can find here. We didn't do nearly as well as they did, lol, but it was fun and Cade made a wand he was pretty proud of.

Here he is rolling his paper for his wand.

His finished project.

    He wanted to incorporate the Deathly Hallows on the wand, so that's where the triangles, circles and lines come in on his design. I thought it was a pretty cool idea.

Wingardium Leviosa!  My goofball kid thinks upside down is better and likes the wider end for the pointer end.  Gotta love him!

    Overall we had a great day, and he even expressed the desire to learn more about J.K. Rowling and her personal life. I find that so cool!  I can't wait to see what is in store for this year!

It all starts with the Letter...

    You can't have a Hogwarts Homeschool without first having an acceptance letter.  I created ours from ideas I found online.  Pinterest has a ton. I found all kinds of Harry Potter related fonts by a quick Google search.  I, personally liked these from Harry Potter Fan Zone and these from Font Space. We are getting a frame for it so he can hang it on his wall.

We are actually starting school August 26th, but our first week is review and getting back into the habit of school, plus we need a couple art classes before we hit Hogwarts so we can make our wands!! (Not to mention that we just moved at the beginning of the month and I still have not found my glue gun, so a couple extra days will help...hopefully.)

He also has his ticket for the Hogwarts Express.  How else would he get there?  I printed this off from an online image.

The best part of everything, my son, the child that is not going to like school no matter what, has said, "he thinks he's actually a little excited for school to start this year."  I had to take his temp. Please, let that feeling last... Here's to hoping he stays excited through this year!  We'll be chronicling our Hogwarts Homeschool adventure here over the next school year to look back on and share ideas if anyone is interested.

What we mean by Hogwarts Homeschooling

    So what exactly do we mean by Hogwarts Homeschooling?  In our case, it's incorporating a Harry Potter theme into schooling as much as we can. It also means we get to transform our house-mostly upstairs, into a Harry Potter world theme. I am still working on things for that.  It will grow as the year goes on.
   I had already previously done the Hogwarts House Crests on canvas. Regardless of my son's hesitancy in Harry Potter, I've been a bit of a Potter head for a while...lol.

  
  And I just finished Cade's bigger canvas with his house on it yesterday for his bedroom door...

At the end of the last school year, when we decided we were going to do the theme for this year we put the Hogwarts Houses into a hat, (our sorting hat) and he pulled a house out. We did this so we could figure out what we wanted to do for his room.

I also finished this two nights ago.  Our Hogwarts Express platform 9 and 3/4 sign, (on foam board). I have plans for it, if it works, but I will reveal that later...

Over the next couple weeks, I plan to come up with and complete more projects in between life and lesson plans, but this is a start. At least where our new home decor is concerned...

    As far as schooling goes,  our main goal (theme-wise) is to get through all 7 Harry Potter books before school is out in June. Our weekly vocabulary and spelling words come straight from our planned reading for the week.  After our reading, we have reading comprehension worksheets I am designing myself. (So far I have written and put together our curriculum each year instead of using a commercial curriculum. That will change in a couple years, especially for math.)

    Our art class or what we are calling Transfiguration, (we are transfiguring things into art, right? ) will contain a lot of Harry Potter themed arts and crafts, (more decor for the house...lol) And our normal subjects will be hidden within the Hogwarts subjects as well.
    Charms class will be our language arts subjects. After all, charms rely on words, right? Of course Arithmancy translates into Arithmetic...good old fashioned math. History of Magic will be our US History class and Ancient Ruins will be our Geography, (which we will be focusing primarily on England.) We can't forget Defense Against the Dark Arts, which will be predominantly health classes dealing with anti bullying, fire safety, stranger interaction/stranger danger, online and web safety, and everyday home safety.  Flying/Quidditch well that is all part of P.E.  Muggle Studies will be music and anything that we have to cover that doesn't logically fit into any Hogwarts equivalent.  
    Now, quite a few classes will be part of our science curriculum.  We are starting with Care of Magical Creatures, in the Muggle world, that will be Introduction to Zoology. Of course this means a trip to the zoo, but we are also going to pick and research some of the more rare species that might seem like they should be in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. And watching that will be on the list of things to do for zoology as well as identifying species specific needs, nocturnal/diurnal/crepuscular identification, endangered and extinct and native to our state animals.
    Astronomy and Divination would be next up on the list.  We'll be doing Astronomy and (the theory of) Astrology.  Cade loves the night skies and has a great appreciation for nature and it's beauty. 
    Potions. Now here is a no brainer. Introduction to Chemistry.  We've done different "experiments" with chemical reactions and such, this will give us a great forum to build on that and hello Pinterest! Harry Potter experiments all over the place! Watch out Professor Snape! Here we come. 
    Alchemy was a bit harder to find a place for in our Muggle education.  What we settled on was an Introduction to Geology.  Studying the minerals and metals our earth is made from and rock formations and classes of rock.
    Lastly, Herbology. Another one that was easy to translate to Muggle.... Botany.  We've done a lot of studies on plants, what they need, classification and so forth.  For this class we will be visiting a plant nursery, focusing on edible plants/fruit bearing plants and medicinal properties of plants and herbs.

There's always room for more ideas if they come up, and in science we always like to leave space for topics that catch Cade's interest that he wants to learn more about, but that is our outline for studies in relation to our Hogwarts Homeschool theme.

About Us

    Hello and welcome to our new blog! We are homeschoolers in Northern, (very northern,) New York.  My name is Amy and I am a single mom to an awesome, and sometimes very trying, 11 year old son named Cade.  I am also my elderly father's caretaker which has given me the ability to stay home and homeschool my son. 

    We left the public school system in my son's last quarter of Kindergarten.  I had toyed with the idea probably before I was even pregnant.  I had hated public school and always wished I could be homeschooled.  My sister homeschooled her children.  My niece actually went all the way through school being homeschooled. So it was something I often imagined for my own children or child.  So after a year of Headstart and 3/4 a year of kindergarten I decided I wanted to try.  But, I didn't want to wait until he was going in first grade and find out we couldn't handle it and decide to put him back in public and have him be behind, so I pulled him the last quarter to get a feel for it.  If it worked-great! If not, he would commence with first grade in the fall- no harm, no foul.
    Needless to say we decided to stick with it and we are getting ready for our 6th full year of homeschooling.  Now, I won't lie and say its been all smiles and roses and a kid ready and loving to learn.  My kid has always hated school.  Anything that takes him away from what he could be doing is not pleasant to him.  Of course, he'd prefer to be homeschooled rather than go to public school, but don't expect him to like school...those are his words.
    Honestly I envisioned this much different. I envisioned instilling a love of learning. An eager face at the table just waiting for our next lesson, (what the heck was I thinking?) Ok, so maybe I was dreaming a little.  Maybe I read too many homeschool blogs that made it sound like it was the perfect solution to putting my baby boy in school. (Yeah, we were quite late in cutting the umbilical cord too.)
    Seriously though, he was doing fine in public, but I could see he needed one on one that he was not going to get in public school. And on top of that I had a million and one reasons that I really wanted to try homeschooling.  From the issues with bullying, violence in the schools, overcrowded classrooms, having more control over what and when my child learned certain things, being able to let him learn in a manner that was right for him, not the one size fits all plan that is public education, to having more flexible hours and days, (we are night owls, both myself and my son,) more family time, more parenting time and many other factors.
    So, even though it hasn't been the stuff dreams are made from every day, it's been an experience with the good outweighing the not so good.  Each year seems to have gotten better.  Last year was the best yet, (with the exception of our standardized tests-my boy and testing is not a fun thing.) We seemed to find a good rhythm and had a smoother year.  Every year I search for that one element that will make the year better.  Make it more fun.  Make my son look forward to learning and  enjoy it at least a little...
    I think I may have found it.  It's taken me two years to get him interested in Harry Potter, but earlier this year I finally convinced him to at least give the movies a try.  He gave in.  He actually found he enjoyed them, especially the first three, (which I also feel are the best of the series.)  Once I had his interest I proposed we have a themed homeschool year.  A Harry Potter year.  It would be the perfect year to do it.  After all it's the same year that Harry got his acceptance letter, 11 years old and in his 6th year of school. What would be a better idea than to become a first year at Hogwarts? He was game and I was excited...which leads us here to our new blog as we get ready to start our Hogwarts Homeschool.