A Ravenclaw Victory
Today was one of those days when I was glad to be a teacher. It was the last official day of the Gr. 5 Harry Potter unit and the kids had been looking forward to it all week. Just as we had done last year, we finished our unit with a morning trivia competition with prizes. During the week we had had the students prepare pages of trivia questions based on "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets", dividing their work into easy and hard questions. My Gr. 5 teacher partner, Lily, put Hogwarts house banners on her classroom wall and prepared house tags to put into our own version of a Sorting Hat.
This morning the kids were quite audibly excited. We all moved into Ms. Salerno's classroom and started by sorting the kids into their houses. The kids just loved that. They had to come up front, spin around once and then put their hand into the Sorting Hat to pull out a card declaring which house they were in. As each student went up the others held their breath and then cheers and shouts of "Hufflepuff!", "Slytherin!" could be heard (scary how many kids -wanted- to be in Slytherin :)). It was fun and satisfying to see just how enthusiastically they were getting into the spirit of the activity. I really regret that I forgot to take my camera today!
We promised the house winning the trivia contest that they would get a pizza lunch next Thursday, high stakes, indeed, for a ten-year-old! For each round of the game one student from each house came up to answer questions. They had to pick between an easy question (5 points) and a hard question (10 points) before answering their question for their house, a strategy that became more complex as the game went along. Like last year, I was impressed with the knowledge the students had of the book they had just studied, even beyond what they had seen in the movie. The teams cheered on their players, learned to support each other even when answers were wrong and found a bond to their Hogwarts house and house-mates.
The game stayed unpredictable with the Hufflepuff team, who was leading early on, faltering late in the game and the slow-starting Gryffindor team having a run of good luck at that same time. In the final minutes of the game, with the questions now worth 10 and 20 points each, it became a see-saw battle between Gryffindor and Ravenclaw. In the final minutes of the game Ravenclaw took a 20 point lead and ended triumphant as our winner.
Even once they got back to our classroom, the Gr. 5 students were a-buzz about the game, the strategies they used and the questions they both wrote and answered. It's one of those moments when you realize that these kids will be talking about this day for years to come. They'll be buying the seventh Harry Potter book in five years' time and reminiscing, "Remember the Harry Potter trivia game we played in Gr. 5? I was in Slytherin!".
It's kind of cool to realize that as a teacher you're able to create those kind of memories.
This morning the kids were quite audibly excited. We all moved into Ms. Salerno's classroom and started by sorting the kids into their houses. The kids just loved that. They had to come up front, spin around once and then put their hand into the Sorting Hat to pull out a card declaring which house they were in. As each student went up the others held their breath and then cheers and shouts of "Hufflepuff!", "Slytherin!" could be heard (scary how many kids -wanted- to be in Slytherin :)). It was fun and satisfying to see just how enthusiastically they were getting into the spirit of the activity. I really regret that I forgot to take my camera today!
We promised the house winning the trivia contest that they would get a pizza lunch next Thursday, high stakes, indeed, for a ten-year-old! For each round of the game one student from each house came up to answer questions. They had to pick between an easy question (5 points) and a hard question (10 points) before answering their question for their house, a strategy that became more complex as the game went along. Like last year, I was impressed with the knowledge the students had of the book they had just studied, even beyond what they had seen in the movie. The teams cheered on their players, learned to support each other even when answers were wrong and found a bond to their Hogwarts house and house-mates.
The game stayed unpredictable with the Hufflepuff team, who was leading early on, faltering late in the game and the slow-starting Gryffindor team having a run of good luck at that same time. In the final minutes of the game, with the questions now worth 10 and 20 points each, it became a see-saw battle between Gryffindor and Ravenclaw. In the final minutes of the game Ravenclaw took a 20 point lead and ended triumphant as our winner.
Even once they got back to our classroom, the Gr. 5 students were a-buzz about the game, the strategies they used and the questions they both wrote and answered. It's one of those moments when you realize that these kids will be talking about this day for years to come. They'll be buying the seventh Harry Potter book in five years' time and reminiscing, "Remember the Harry Potter trivia game we played in Gr. 5? I was in Slytherin!".
It's kind of cool to realize that as a teacher you're able to create those kind of memories.