Sorting

When the campers got back to the house with the Hogwarts Express, they dropped off their supplies and lined up in alphabetical order to file into the Great Hall, which was two little picnic tables and large chairs in a row at the front for the counselors.

We borrowed a Sorting Hat from a friend, and during the second session we attempted to make him sing a song by holding a cell phone on speakerphone under the hat while a few people sang a sorting song that Georgia wrote on their end of the phone from inside the house. However, this was hard to hear even for the person holding the hat, although the kids were very curious about where the song was coming from (they figured it out pretty quickly). We had pre-sorted the kids mostly based on age and number of books they had read to try to make the houses even, so similarly when the hat was placed on each camper's head, Georgia was on the other end of the phone inside, watching from the window and calling out their houses. Again, not loud enough for anyone but the person being sorted to hear. Once each kid was sorted they received a bandanna the color of their house to wear during Quidditch/for house pride.
After everyone was sorted we served cauldron cakes and dragon blood juice (fruit punch) and handed out schedules for their first day of classes.

A note on the houses: we decided to create different houses for camp than the ones in the book so that there would be no hurt feelings about being in Hufflepuff or Slytherin, etc. The explanation for this is that we are at The Chicagoan Hogwarts Academy ("Chicogwarts" as the kids called it) and not in Scotland. Georgia and I went to a lot of effort to design these houses, but it was super fun! Essentially we set certain parameters to make them similar in basis to the ones in the book, so we started with four colors, purple, blue, green, and orange, and then gave them secondary colors of silver or gold, and started coming up with animals. We also chose to stick with the idea of each house representing one of the four elements, and we also arbitrarily decided to choose only horned animals as well. Then we spent a long time coming up with suitable names, using latin and other languages for inspiration, and assigned each house a pretty generic positive trait. Finally I designed and drew the crests in Photoshop, which I am pretty proud of! The results are as follows:

Langier - Orange and Silver - Rams - Perseverant - Fire element

Tarandarus - Green and Gold - Stags - Peaceful - Earth Element

Noctura - Purple and Silver - (Horned) Owls - Helpful - Air Element

Esseldor - Blue and Gold - Narwhals - Carefree - Water Element

For each session, we only used 2 of the houses because we barely had enough kids for 2 Quidditch teams, much less 4. It also made it easier to keep track of house points, which were kept track of in vases I got at the dollar store and some of those small decorative glass stones. We made each stone worth 5 points the first session and 2 points the second; it depends on how many points you give out, because I kept forgetting about them!

As part of our History of Magic class, I wrote a history of the founders of the Chicagoan Hogwarts to tell the campers in the second session. Here is the story:

Emiliana Esseldor, Nessandra Noctura, Tarmog Tarandarus, and Lentero Langier were 4 friends who had attended the original Hogwarts in Scotland together and were all Hufflepuffs. They were pioneers in America as the Midwest was being settled, and they decided that wizards who settled there like they had needed a school for their children that was closer than the established wizarding schools on the east coast, such as the Salem Institute of Witchcraft. Like the founders of Hogwarts, they created 4 houses based on the characteristics they found most important (all of which can potentially be placed under the Hufflepuff umbrella due to their childhood house).

However, the friends suffered difficulties in later years. When Nessandra Noctura married Tarmog Tarandarus, Emiliana Esseldor's heart was broken and she returned to Britain where she served as the head of Hufflepuff House for many years. Not long after Esseldor left, Lentero Langier left the school and headed for the Wild West and was never heard from again. 

Noctura and Tarandarus were left to run the school, which they did until the mysterious death of Tarandarus. Noctura almost went insane from grief and the fate of the school was in question. Then Esseldor returned to nurse her old friend back to health, in an act that emulated the values of the other founders of the school: peacefulness, helpfulness, and perseverance. The two women continued to run the school until they both died of very old age, each within hours of the other.

When I told the kids this story in class, I especially emphasized how the traits of all the houses were important in saving the school when it was in crisis, which was kind of cheesy but fun!