Use Harry Potter to Teach Your Kids: A Professor’s Guide to Turning Movies You’ll Watch Anyway into a Fun Lesson Plan for Your Children 

Use Harry Potter to Teach Your Kids: A Professor’s Guide to Turning Movies You’ll Watch Anyway into a Fun Lesson Plan for Your Children 

By Noah Charney 

I recently first read, then watched, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone with my 5- and 7-year-old daughters. It’s a wonderful story, of course, and one you’re likely to read and watch just for fun, because kids and parents both enjoy it. But for me, a professor interested in being a proactive parent and in sparking a love of learning in my girls, it was just the latest in a planned series of activities we do together for entertainment, which I take as a carefully-planned but easy-to-execute opportunity to teach.  

A single movie night can turn into a bountiful learning experience for parents to share with their kids. It begins with discussing what we will see in the film and continues after the credits have rolled, in the following days, as we talk about what we’ve seen and some of the lessons that can be drawn from it. In this case, Harry Potter led to twenty lessons in miniature, “lessonlets,” each of which took only a few minutes, but which were easier to remember, and more engaging, because of their connection to the film. From how train stations work to castle architecture, from the real-life sets for Hogwarts to synonyms for “wizard,” from basic Latin (used in spells) to an intro to chess (used to guard the Philosopher’s Stone), an evening’s entertainment can be used to develop a fun, organic lesson plan from the movies you’ll watch anyway as a family. 

This technique and more are developed in my new book, Superpower Your Kids: A Professor’s Guide to Teaching Your Children Everything in Just 15 Minutes a Day. It’s a limited-edition book, available only in June for backers of a Kickstarter campaign for the book + a tie-in smartphone app.  

I apply the same system with my young daughters that I do in the university classroom: Preview-Engage-Review. Before the movie starts, I “preview” the sort of things we’ll see in it. That’s not to give away plot, but to lay out some things to look out for and to look forward to. In this case, we’ve got a marvelous castle, Hogwarts, that is a boarding school for aspiring wizards and witches. We’ve got courses on magic, and a mystery to solve. During the film, I’m often pointing things out or asking the kids questions. This, I fully understand, could be annoying, depending on what you’re used to. I find that engagement with my kids during the film helps them to be engaged with the film. When they were younger, even watching a movie they really liked, their attention would start to drift, and this helped keep them focused. As they get older it’s no longer necessary, but it does help if I point out some of the elements of the film that we’ll later use for activities and lessonlets. Then, after the film, we “review” what we saw. I ask them what they liked best, what’s the main thing they remember, which characters they liked, which spell they’d like to learn, and so on. This helps cement in the memory what we saw and empowers the kids to see that adults value their opinion.  

In the following days, then, I pulled out activities and miniature lessons related to the content of the film, which will be fresh in our memories. There are twenty lessonlets based on Harry Potter in my book, Superpower Your Kids. Here are six of them as examples.  

Learn some (very) basic Latin. There are uses of Latin in the film, particularly in the magic words through which spells are cast (Alarte Ascendare, which Gilderoy Lockhart uses to throw a snake into the air, links to the Latin Ascendere meaning “to go up;” Amato Animo Animato Animagus helps you become an “animagus,” able to transform into an animal, and the Latin Amato (linked to “love”) and Animo (anima is spirit or soul), Animato is linked to the etymology of “animate”…you see the picture). The kids wanted to have wizard’s duels for fun, and so we learned some of the Harry Potter spells, with their pseudo-Latin which let us talk about some real Latin words from which the spells are derived. 

Castle architecture. Hogwarts stirs the imagination, and it offers the opportunity to talk about castle architecture and do a virtual tour of some real castles that inspired Hogwarts. We designed our own castle based on the architectural components at Hogwarts: towers, ramparts, a great hall held up by buttresses, a draw bridge. You can get technical if you want to “level up” with your kids, and show them various column capitals and portcullises and mullions and that sort of thing, but for my 5- and 7-year-olds basic shapes like towers and arrow slits were as technical as it got. We drew each component of a castle, labelled it with its name (because remembering the proper term for something is key), and then we each designed and drew our own castle based on those elements.  

Coats–of–Arms. The four houses at Hogwarts each have their own coat-of-arms (Slytherin’s snake, Ravenclaw’s raven). We talked about the origin of coats-of-arms (so knights, anonymous in suits of armor, could be identified) and looked at some famous examples from history (the Roman noble Barberini family has a heraldic sign comprised of bees, the Plantagenets had three lions on a blue ground). Then we designed a coat of arms for us, the Charney family. We “leveled up” by describing the difference between a coat-of-arms or armorial, and an impresa, an Italian term for a coat-of-arms for a single person as opposed to a family line. So they designed an impresa for themselves—an image and a slogan written on a scroll beneath it. 

Boarding School. I attended a boarding school in the US (old by American standards, founded in 1890) that felt magical, other-worldly and wonderful. Hogwarts minus the actual magic. I loved it. I also fulfilled the American fantasy of attending University of Cambridge, which was even more Hogwartian. I took this as a chance to talk about my own boarding school experiences, which is fascinating and a little frightening for tiny children to learn that older children can live away from home (and happily). We took virtual tours of both Choate and my Cambridge College (Johns) and discussed what they would pack if they were to go away to study. This made the idea of leaving home to live elsewhere for awhile and do what you enjoy feel empowering, rather than intimidating. 

Parseltongue. Snakes speak a language of their own that, somehow, Harry can understand. This led us to discuss how snakes in real life communicate. We enlisted the wonderful Sir David Attenborough and watched a documentary on snakes and used an animal encyclopedia to fill out our knowledge. Then they drew their favorite snake from the encyclopedia and we labelled some of its part that we remembered (the forked tongue was a popular one).  

Synonyms for wizard. Playing the synonym game is fun and expands vocabulary. You don’t need to bring in complex synonyms that kids wouldn’t have ever heard. There are plenty for “wizard.” We tested how many we could name (and no worries if the meaning isn’t precisely the same): magician, enchanter, warlock, witch, conjurer, illusionist, sorcerer, mage…  

There’s so much more from this film and novel alone, but I’ll save the rest for later! 

Of course, you can take this same concept and use just about any film or novel to put it into practice. Lessonlets can be drawn from any source, and a source as long as a feature film or novel will have a bounty of them. For an example of how I used the same technique for the classic film, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, click here (it’s at the bottom of the campaign page).  

Dr Noah Charney is a best-selling, Pulitzer-nominated author, professor of art history and father of two girls, age 5 and 7. His latest project is a limited edition parenting book plus app, available only through Kickstarter in June.