My youngest daughter is currently reading the Harry Potter series of books, so of course she wanted a Harry Potter party.
I’ve got to say this party was really fun to plan. We’ve gone for a slightly more generic school of witches and wizards theme but drew a lot of inspriation from the rich world of the Harry Potter books.
Menu
The menu for this party was delightfully easy. The food for the most part takes a bit of a backstage role. Think English boarding school or pub food. Luckily usually the kind of food kids love. Bangers (sausages), eclairs, fruit bowls – these all feature on the Hogwarts banquet table. There are some sweet treats that are pretty much a must. Bertie Bots every flavour jelly beans, chocolate frogs and we also used Ferrero Rocher as golden snitches.
Decoration Ideas
While it certainly helps to have an older house with a bit of character to stage your party a few well placed props will help set the scene in any home. Many of these can double as Halloween decorations and can be sourced from party shops. The vintage items from second hand stores, garage sales or friends and family. Here are a few ideas.
- Old suitcases
- Boxes wrapped in brown paper and tied up with hemp twine
- Stacks of old books
- Skulls
- Spiders
- Snakes
- Caldrons
- Broomsticks
The Banquet Hall
We used a long tressle table and covered it with a black plastic table cloth and bench seats. This arrangement fits a lot of kids in a small space.
The floating candles and tented ceiling
We used black sheets attached to the walls plus an elastic washing line stung like a zig zag across the room to support the sheets. The candles were made by using little electric tea lights hot glued into the top of a toilet roll then I wrapped some cream cardboard around each. Fishing line was attached to the wick and the candles hung from this and were attached to the washing line hidden amongst the sheets.
Set your table up with candelabra, bowls of fruit and goblets for the butter beer!
Tip: You need to turn on the tea lights before glueing them into the toilet rolls and for this reason you have to leave this job till the night before otherwise your tea light batteries will run out!
Activities
There are loads of possibilities for a Witches and Wizards party. Here’s what we did.
Sorting hat
When the guest arrived each was asked to put the sorting hat on then pick a badge at random from a hat. This determined their house. They were then given a house badge printed on sticky paper to wear and a matching scarf. The scarfs were a big hit. These were the guests take home gifts and we were thrilled to see some of the kids wearing them to school the next day. We anticipated that we might have some tears over the kids that got Slytherin so we decided we’d tell them that gave them the right to be a bit naughty. Your choice if you want to offer that!
Make a wand
Make sure you have plenty of hot glue sticks for this activity and definitely do this at the start of the party to allow the glue and paint to dry by home time. Extra adult helper are useful to have here too depending on the age of your party goers.
Scavenger hunt and Polyjuice Charades
We came up with some clever clues and sent the party goers on a quest to find various items that fit the theme around the house.
Polyjuice Charades are my daughters invention. Here’s what you’ll need…
- A box of dress ups with items in theme for your characters
- Some potion bottles
- PPI Polyjuice Charade Cards
The basic idea is that party goers take turns drinking (or pretending to drink) the potion, go off into another room where they are given a card with a character on it. They have some props from the dress ups to help them then they go back in to the party acting as that character and have a quote from the character to act. Then the party goers guess who they have transformed into.
Then really all there is left to do is eat, drink and have a magical time.