Harry Potter!

This week has (so far) been one of the most exciting, exhausting, challenging, inspiring, encouraging, and creative weeks of my life! That is because at this time each year, Ropes Crossing Church holds a week-long School Holiday Program to entertain children in Preschool to Year 6 during the first week of the holidays, and this year I have been made responsible for morning tea craft and craft for each day (I'm sure I've mentioned before that I love themes)! The theme for this year's program is 'Magic'.

WEDNESDAY - the Magic of Wizardry and God's Power over Evil

While we were planning this week and looking at the idea of magic, of course wizards and witches were mentioned! And what other popular books/movies to relate that to than Harry Potter!

From there, my mind went to things we could make and create in that theme (Harry Potter), and having seen a few of the movies, I thought of owls (and broomsticks and potions and rats and snakes - but owls are less creepy and more cute). So most of my input for the day was pretty much related to owls...

I've been waiting weeks for this day to come since working out what we were going to be making, creating, and eating!

Morning tea craft was an owl cupcake! Not too long ago, I went to an owl themed baby shower! Served for dessert were these owl cupcakes. They looked absolutely amazing and far beyond my own creative ability... Intrigued, I took one home as a souvenir (and so that I could have a proper look at it without the context of many unfamiliar faces). After further (in the privacy of my own home) investigations, it actually looked fairly simple -but effective- and something that I could do!

I thought that it may have been tricky, though, for children to manage, but I was pleasantly surprised when they were all having a great time doing exactly what they needed to do! I made an instruction sheet for them to refer to, and also demonstrated with a cupcake of my own (sometimes to see something being made is better teaching than simply showing what the finished product should look like)...

Preparing for this particular morning tea craft, I baked and (for the first time!) froze dozens of cupcakes that I had made a week beforehand (in one of my 'I am too excited to wait, so I will organise myself now' moments)... I wrapped them by the 1/2 dozen in freezer bags, making sure that I followed exact instructions from this blog, which told me that when I thaw them, I should take them out, and unwrap the cupcakes 1.5 hours before using them (I am so glad that they did all the hard work researching the best method of freezing and thawing cupcakes so that I didn't have to!)

My instruction sheet:

And I made sure that there was plenty of chocolate icing :)

The kids were so so clever with their cupcake-decorating skills! I may need to recruit them in the future! On a side-note, I really do underestimate what children can do. I think I need to stop doing that because here's a couple of the owl cupcakes the kids made today:

I think this is Tamara trying to be an owl, with her owl.

Craft was, again, an owl. But made of cardboard this time, instead of cake...

Here is my demo owl before gluing everything on; before I added the split pins for the wings so they could 'flap'; and before I had bought proper craft eyes. The eyes in the photo below were made from brown mini M n M's, and not long after this photo was taken, my 2 year old ate those mini M n M's...

With different shades of brown cardboard, and owl outlines I had printed out, I traced onto each piece of cardboard (30 x 30cm) 3 owl body outlines, and 4 wings, which I balanced out later by tracing more wings and less bodies on other sheets. I mix-matched the owl pieces, so that only a few out of 50 would look the same :)

The production line of putting things into bags began again, and luckily I still had about 100 bottle lids from my collection that I was super happy finding something to actually use them on! There were owls with white eyes, yellow eyes, blue eyes and pink eyes! And they all looked really great!

This is Ben and Tamara mid-craft, and their finished crafts:

And, as per usual, there's children who come up with even more awesome ideas that I don't think of, and just do them and show me... One clever girl, who wears glasses, drew glasses onto her owl! And, Harry Potter wears glasses! I'm not sure if it was to match her or match the Harry Potter theme, but her owl looked absolutely brilliant:

To add to the craft today, we also made wizard hats. They were different coloured party hats, with gold & silver star stickers, and glow in the dark stars stuck all around them. Luckily I didn't use one up for a demo hat, because there were so many children today that we used up all the hats and all the stars!

Here's Ben wearing his wizard hat:

And, of course, Jonathan didn't want to miss out on any of the fun, either... So he ate my demo cupcake, and insisted he wear the last party hat, but without stickers because he was tired and didn't want any.. No problem. Smile for the camera? Not a chance!

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If you would like to see more photos of today's Magic, please visit Ropes Crossing Church's Facebook page. There's still 2 more days of creativeness and magic, so if you are local to Ropes Crossing, why not come and join us!