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Harry Potter fans spend a magical week at Hogwarts

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Tess Colwell⁄Special to the Gazette Samantha Beltra, 8, Jordan Kressley, 9, and Brandon Daus, 12 (foreground) play with the static globe during Harry Potter Camp at Frederick Community College.

Black lace designed in a spider web pattern draped instructor Julie Amegashie’s desk and a sharp-eyed stuffed raven glared at those who entered the classroom.

Nearby, students eagerly copied down a potion for ‘‘wurm slime” in a journal after their mid-morning snack of frog’s toes and fruit-flavored bat spit. Only those who didn’t believe in magic, or ‘‘muggles,” would call the snacks Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers and Pop Rocks candy, Amegashie said.

All this week, children ages 7-12 indulged their love of the Harry Potter series in Frederick Community College’s Kids on Campus program, ‘‘A Week at Hogwarts: Harry Potter and Friends.”

Kids on Campus is a learning enrichment program that offers weekend or early evening classes in the fall, spring and summer for children ages 2-16. According to Leslie Ruby, program manager of Kids on Campus, classes in foreign languages, science and art are designed so that kids not only have fun, but also integrate learned skills.

This week’s Harry Potter class was the last session for the summer, and was strictly devoted to children who were more interested in the six-book series than the Harry Potter films.

Amegashie separated the students into the four ‘‘houses” of Hogwarts: Slytherin, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor and Ravenclaw.

For three hours each day, 24 boys and girls became students at Hogwarts, the fictional school in the popular children’s series, and explored their favorite parts of the novels through crafts, games and discussion. Classroom curriculum revolved around subjects like potions, herbology and charms.

Amegashie, a former art teacher at the Monocacy Valley Montessori School, started each day by reading an excerpt from the series. She has taught the Harry Potter class since 2001, and tries each year to make it more imaginative and fresh for her students who often come back each summer.

‘‘It’s turned out to be the one class that lets me go beyond what I know,” she said. ‘‘It lets me use my imagination.”

Amegashie has three children of her own, and said she started to enjoy Harry Potter with her son who was 11 years old at the time. She chooses parts of the novels that she can easily create activities from using materials from dollar and craft stores, she said.

In one activity, students created a ‘‘mirror of desire,” by decorating a small mirror that was supposed to reflect their heart’s desire, Amegashie said.

Still, imagination is the main ingredient in every project or activity. Mixing ordinary materials like Elmer’s glue, water, food coloring and borax soap in a Ziplock bag isn’t simply a chemistry experiment, it’s dragon slime – a moist and rubbery substance that elicited squeals of laughter from the kids.

The students grabbed fistfuls of blue, red, yellow, pink, purple and green dragon slime from their bags and artfully arranged them into small, glass candleholders.

Nine-year-old Emma Hertel of Frederick molded her green dragon slime into a ball and unexpectedly discovered it bounced.

During another game, 11-year-old Katlyn Simmons and Mary Lewis, both from Harper’s Ferry, happily grilled each other with yes and no questions in order to find out which character Amegashie had secretly taped to their backs. Both girls were dressed for the occasion and wore black, pointy witches’ hats.

‘‘Am I a teacher? Am I a student?” Mary asked.

‘‘Do you know who you are?” Katlyn asked after she answered Mary.

For two years, Mary has participated in the Harry Potter program after her mother exposed her to the series, she said.

During a round of trivia questions that Amegashie posed to each group, Mary quickly consulted her own notes before her group gave a final answer.

It is ‘‘the magic and that you don’t know who’s good and who’s evil,” that she loves about Harry Potter. Along with Katlyn, Mary predicted that Harry Potter would die in the anticipated seventh book.

Teaching the class also allows Amegashie to encourage her students’ interest in reading and expose them to other imaginative children’s books that are similar to Harry Potter, she said.

In the book of puzzles, quizzes and activities that she made for each student, she included a recommended reading list of classic children’s novels like Roald Dahl’s James and ‘‘The Giant Peach” and Frank L. Baum’s ‘‘The Wizard of Oz.”

This pleased Mary’s mother, Tana Lewis, who read several Harry Potter books for an easy read one summer. ‘‘That’s a big plus-to get them into books and it makes them use their imagination to read,” Lewis said.