DIY Hogwarts House Points Counter

Hogwarts House Points Counter

When “Spiderman Jr.” picked Harry Potter as one of his themes for a home school unit our other children got really excited.  They have enjoyed some of the left-over’s or side effects of other themes he has picked, for example, the super hero unit.  However, this unit has had all four children anticipating its arrival for a couple of months. 

When my kids found out that Harry Potter was the next unit “Spiderman Jr.” was going to do “Soccerboy” asked if he could participate in the activities I did with his brother. I was shocked, although I probably shouldn’t have been considering his feelings on this book series.  

It wasn’t much later that same day when our girls made the same request.  I agreed to let them participate if all of their public school work was done first.

I then started thinking about how much fun it would be for our youngest to have his sibling do activities with him.  He usually has a good time with them.

Eventually my thoughts went to the House Cup and earning house points.  I thought of putting the different kids in different houses and being able to award points for the good things they do.  I started looking around at some of the DIY house points counters and there was not a lot out there.  Some looked really pretty but didn’t function.  Some would be easy to put points in and take out but didn’t look a lot like the house points counters. If it did not look like the one in the book is described it would drive them crazy, they would not be able to let it go. I could imagine them mentioning it every day and if our youngest heard this comparison then he would get fixated on it and would not be able to let it go. 

So I had to decide if it would be possible to make a house point counter and would it be worth it to make it or would I have to let the idea go?  I decided that it would be worth the work if it would increase the amount of fun our youngest would have because more fun means more learning.

I then looked at the images of the house point counter from the movie and realized that there is no slot for the points to slide through.  Why would there need to be really, it’s a world of magic.  So I knew I would have to hide any functional mechanisms I added as much as possible.  I looked through designs for machines like gum balls, coin turner etc.  I had more than one attempt before I was able to make a working model and in the end there were some appearance ideas I had to skip(like painting the frame) because I was out of time for adding them.  I hope these ideas will help you make an even better model.

Materials you will need:

12 clear soda bottles

4 large pieces of flat plastic

1 exacto knife

1 sharpie marker

1 hole punch

A spool of clear lanyard

Goo gone

1 ruler

4 brads

A drill and drill bit big enough to make a hole for the brad

Tape- electrical or duct tape (you need a strong tape)

Scrap wood

Screws

Drill bit that makes holes

Glass marbles in the four house colors

Step#1

 

I peeled the labels off 12 clear soda bottles.  Then used some homemade goo gone to take as much of the label glue off as I could.

Step#2

I took a yellow sharpie marker and drew a line around the bottom of the soda bottles where it changes from flat to a slightly bubbled curve on all 12 soda bottles.

Step#3

 

I took an exacto knife and cut along the line I had drawn.  Some tips about cutting: lightly cut along the line first then slowly follow this line many times. I slipped with the exacto knife a couple of times and then had a crooked line so I had to clean more bottles.

Step#4

 

I then took clear plastic from strawberry cartons and other plastic items that had been purchased and cut a rectangular shape out of them.  The rectangle was just wide enough to cover the hole that the soda would pour out of but also not so wide that it would not slide easily up and down the slope of the soda bottle on the inside. Cut four of these.

Step#5

I took the soda bottle and set the hole that the soda would pour out of and traced around the hole. I made sure that the circle was in the middle of the rectangle I had cut. Then cut out this circle from each of the four rectangles.

Step#6

I then drew with the sharpie a line to the left of the circle I had just cut. The line went from near the circle and close to the edge of the rectangle. Cutting and strength tip: leave enough room in between the circle and the end of the rectangle or the brad you will be putting in will rip through the plastic or the weight of the marbles will rip through it as you use this pulling device.  Also again cut gently the first time and slowly after or you will go crooked or cut something you don’t mean to. After you cut this line widen this cut line just big enough to have the brad slide through it back and forth. Do this to all four rectangles.

Step#7

Take the bottom end of your soda bottle and cut a slit (do not widen this) along the curve of the bottle. The cut is a little wider than your plastic rectangle piece. Do not go too low on the bottle because this mechanism does not work if you do.  You are trying to have the slit high enough that the plastic rectangles that will slide through the slit you make go down and then back up the bottle when it crosses to the other side of the bottle. (Again cut slowly and gently, you would think I would have learned the first few times)Do this to four soda bottles.

Step#8

 

Slide the rectangle through the slit. Make sure you put the side that has the hole and the slit you cut through the slit in the bottle first. Slide the rectangle far enough into your bottle so that it is touching the other side of the bottle. The two pieces of plastic should look like two pieces of sandwich bread on top of each other but vertical. There should be some of the rectangle hanging out of the opposite side of the bottle.

Step#9

Turn the bottle around to look directly at the two pieces of plastic that are touching vertically. Look at the bottom of the slit you cut in the rectangle that is inside of the bottle. This should also be the closest part of the slit to the circle you have cut.  Take your sharpie marker and put a dot on the outside of the soda bottle where the bottom of this slit is.  Now drill a hole where you have marked.

Step#10

 

Take a brad and on the inside of the soda bottle you slide it through the slit in the rectangle and then right through the hole you have drilled in the bottle. Now on the outside of the bottle open up the brad on both sides. Check to make sure that the plastic rectangle slides up and down the inside of the bottle by pulling on the end of the rectangle that is sticking out of the bottle.

Step#11

Take two soda bottles that do not have pull tabs and match up the two cut ends together. Now take a hole punch and punch holes along the edges of the two bottles. Do your best to make the holes on the two soda bottles match up.

Step#12

Now take your clear lanyard and lace the two bottles together like you would a shoe and tie a bow.  Tying hint: lace it so that the bow or knot if you choose is at the back.

Step#13

Repeat steps 11 & 12 for six other bottles. You should have four laced together tubes total when you are done.

Step#14

Now take one laced together tube and one of the soda bottles with a tab. Line up two pouring ends together. Alignment hint: make sure the pull tab is in the front and on top. Also make sure the bow or knot you tied is on the back when you are lining the two pouring ends together. Now tape the two pouring ends together thoroughly. Repeat this step with the other bottles.

Step#15

I took some scrap lumber and laid the house counters next to the scrap wood to see how long the wood would need to be.  I will give the measurements I used to create the frame work to supports the counters I made. However, if I were to do it again I would take off about 4 inches from the height of the 33” pieces.

 I cut 2 pieces 33” long.

 I cut 5 pieces of wood at 22” long.

Step#16

I pre-drilled holes for joining two of the 22” pieces of wood so that they would look like the letter L. then screwed them together.  I then repeated these steps with two more 22” boards however they were facing the other way so they looked like _I  or an L in a mirror.

Step#17

I then laid the House point counters on top the L I had created for the bottom and traced with sharpie marker around where the soda cap lids would be.

Step#18

I then drilled holes large enough for the soda caps to go all the way through the wood also making sure there was enough room for me to be able to unscrew the lids so I could remove points if there was any rule breaking.

Step#19

 

I then took one of the 33” long pieces of wood and laid it on top of the L piece of wood I had just drilled holes in. I pre-drilled holes for the screws.  Then drilled the screws in place.  Then repeat this step on the other end of the 33” piece of wood, one shaped like _I on the other end.

Step#20

I then flipped over the pieces I had just put together and repeated step #19 for the other side.

Step#21

I then laid the house points counters in their holes.  I then slide the last 22” piece of wood under the counters where the bottles were taped together. Then removed the counters leaving the wood in place. This was done so I could get this board in the right place.  Marbles or glass beads are really heavy for a plastic soda bottle to hold up so I wanted to add this extra wood piece here to have an anchor for the counters to be tied to.  I then pre-drilled the holes to join this piece of wood in between the two 33” pieces of wood then screwed it all together.

Step#22

I then placed the counters back in their holes and marked on each side of the board, I had just screwed in place, so that I knew where to drill the holes. Then I drilled the holes.

Step#23

(I forgot to take a picture of this while I was making it)

I laid all the house point counters in place and threaded the holes I had drilled with weed whacker line.  As it happened I had left over line in three of the four house colors from weed whackers I had accidentally caused to melt from catching on fire. I had thrown the weed whackers away but kept the line.  I used nylon twine in the missing house color on the one I didn’t have weed whacker line for anchoring.

Step#24

(I forgot to take a picture of this while I was making it)

Now that the counters were somewhat anchored. I decided that I wanted a little more support for the top of the counters. So I drilled two holes above each of the counters and threaded weed whacker line through the holes and punched two holes in the top of each counter and tied the line through the counters to support the weight of the marbles and glass beads.

Step#25

I asked my husband to hang it on the wall and try if he could to put at least one side into some studs because I knew this was going to be really really heavy when we filled it. Thankfully it was just big enough to put both sides into studs, so it was anchored in studs at four points. Yeah for cool husbands!

Step#26

We then filled each house counter with either marbles that matched the twine and glass beads to match the weed whacker line that had anchored that counter. Counter tip: we have a couple of different sizes of glass bead and one marble. Having a variety because that is how it worked out for that color with what we had. I would do it with marbles only if I could. They work the easiest. Sometimes a bead will get stuck and we have to move it around with a chop stick from the top and this never happens with the marbles.

video of the counter working

As each kid has had triumphs or broken rules they have gotten points or lost them.  It had been really fun to see them get excited as they get points.  We have not awarded our house cup yet. We are thinking about letting this completion go beyond the unit till the end of the school year since the whole family is having so much fun with it.

Materials

12 clear soda bottles- already had                               0.00

4 large pieces of flat plastic- already had                        0.00

1 exacto knife- already had                                     0.00

1 sharpie marker- already had                                   0.00

1 hole punch- already had                                       0.00

A spool of clear lanyard- already had                             0.00

Goo gone- already had                                          0.00

1 ruler- already had                                             0.00

4 brads- already had                                            0.00

A drill and drill bit big enough to make a hole for the brad-         6.00

Tape- electrical or duct tape (you need a strong tape) - already had 0.00

Scrap wood- already had                                         0.00

Screws- already had                                             0.00

Drill bit that makes holes- already had                            0.00

Glass bead and marbles-                                         15.00

Total Cost

                                      21.00

Hawkeye Math Activity

Hawkeye Math Activity

   

When I was first planning what to teach “Spiderman Jr.” for home school I sought some advice from a friend of mine.  She had lots of great advice for me which continues to help me as I teach him.

One of the things she shared with me was her template for planning her lessons (here is the link I hope https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8_71tjoHnsNSjlhQ195dVFTZEU/edit?usp=sharing). She picks a theme every week and every day and these themes revolve around her kids interests.  So when I planned out the year I had “Spiderman Jr.” look through some of Every Star is Different Blog for things he liked and a whole bunch of other places. 

Eventually he understood that he could pick anything he wanted to learn about and I would teach around/about that subject and he got even more excited.  One of the things he wanted to study was super heroes. This was particularly hard to create because while there is a lot out there most of the other home school lessons cost money. So I had to come up with a lot of it on my own.   

One of the super heroes I wanted to use as a teaching tool was Hawkeye from the Avengers.  However, I couldn’t find anything out there for him, not even if I bought the lesson which was lame.  So I took some ideas for other things I had seen people do that were not super hero related and I combined, cut out parts or changed parts to make it work for the theme.

Step#1

I took the examples I had seen on-line for DIY Popsicle bows and made one for him. I will note however, that most people said they could bend their stick after an hour. It took me a day of soaking before I could bend mine.

Sep#2

I prepared the q-tips like I have seen others make to go with the Popsicle bows. Here is what I changed. I cut off one end of the q-tip and split the end a little. This is done for real arrows and I think it is easier to shoot with these on the end of an arrow.

Here is where my additions come in, maybe someone else has done this but I didn’t find it on-line.

Step#3

 I and drew red target circles on the old printer paper with red marker.

Step#4

I wrote numbers within each circle for him to aim at with his q-tips.

Step#5

I put a little bit of paint on a piece of plastic for him to dip his q-tips into.

Step#6

I let him dip and aim his q-tip arrows.  He had a lot of fun doing this. He would tell me which number he had hit and it was easy for me to verify that he had because of the paint. 

I could also easily verify that he could recognize the numbers we had been working on. 

It was also great for working on his fine motor skills because of the exact pinching he had to do to hold the q-tip on the string to shoot it.

In the future if he picks super heroes again as a theme I look forward to adding new elements to this activity.  Like when he starts adding, I can have him add up the numbers he has hit.  I could also use this for multiplication even further down the road.  However, it’s too soon to tell if he will still be into super heroes when we get to that in math. Regardless it was fun for him and me.

Materials                     Cost

Popsicle stick- left over          0.00

Dental floss-already had          0.00

Duct tape –left over              0.00

Old printer paper- given to us     0.00

Red marker –already had         0.00

q-tips-                          1.00

Paint-already had             0.00

Total Cost

                                 1.00

Imitation Arendelle Castle Stain glass Window

Imitation Arendelle Castle

Stain glass Window

Eight birthdays are big in our house. When I say big I mean we go as all out as we can; food, decorations, games etc. When a child turns eight they pick the theme, then we look all over for ideas of what has already been done for others parties. We also come up with ideas of stuff that others have not done. The whole thing is food, games, decorations, and games that child has selected.

Since we only go all out twice, eight birthdays and sixteenth it’s not so bad for us as parents. All other birthdays we still celebrate but they are a lot less of everything.

Our “Little Fish” was turning eight a couple of months ago and she wanted a Frozen theme. We dove right in to researching on-line for ideas. However, there were things she that did have not DIY online tutorials.

One of these was her idea for decorating our dining room to look like the Arendelle Castle. She said “the colors in the windows are very pretty.” I told her that those colored windows are called stained glass. We talked a little about how this kind of glass is put together.  We also looked up some images of what real stain glass looks like in Cathedrals. I tried to explain what sunlight does to stained glass windows when it shines through the glass. This was hard for her to understand, I could see that she just was not getting it.

 “Little fish” is normally very quick to catch onto any concept that is explained to her, if you’re willing to answer a lot of questionsJ So when she didn’t understand what I was telling her then showing her I realized that viewing how light interacts with colored glass may be something you have to experience for yourself to really get the full extent of what is involved.

Her lack of understanding this interaction of light, color and glass made me feel sad.  There seems to be less stained glass used in buildings and I couldn’t think of many places for her to go see this for herself. On top of that modern stained glass is different than older stained glass because the materials used to create them are different. Some of the materials used in creating colored glass were toxic/poisonous and while I am glad this can be done more safely. The glass created now is not the same pigments. Those pigments changes affect how the light shines through them.

The other dilemma with her wanting stain glass as a decoration is the expense. It is true that we go as all out as we can on eight birthdays. However, making our dining room window stained glass is out of our price range.

This problem boiled around in my brain for a few weeks before a solution came to me.  “Little Fish” came home from a friend’s birthday party with a gift bag.  The gift bag had tissue paper in it, not that unusual.  Then it hit me as I was folding up the tissue paper to be set aside for reuse.   Tissue paper is very thin, so thin that a person can see through it when they hold a single sheet up in front of their face and it comes in a variety of colors.  I could use the tissue paper to imitate stain glass on our current windows.  So here is how I did it.

Step #1

I looked up pictures of Arendelle Castle to try to find images of the stain glass which didn’t yield any good results. So I thought about the song “Love is an open door” where Anna and Hans are singing and dancing around.  I paused the video when there was a good image of the stained glass behind them then sketched out what it looked like on some scrap paper.

Step#2

 

I went through my tissue paper to select colors that were as close as I could get to what the colors were like in the movie. In some cases I had to layer two different colors on top of each other to get a close match.

Step#3

 I took scissors and clear tape and I started in the center of the stained glass design and cut out one “stained glass square”. I taped it to the middle of our window. 

Step#4

I worked my way out from the center. Making sure as I cut each stained glass piece that if it had a mirrored piece of the same size and/or color on the design that I cut them all out at the same time. This made getting them the same size easier and I eye balled the placement to using the sketch as a reference.  I could have measured to calculate it to make sure it was exact however; real stained glass has some variation so I figured this would make it more authentic.

Step#5

 After all the “stained glass” was in place on the window. I took black electrical tape and cover the seams the “pieces of glass” to imitate wrought iron. I made the mistake of stretching some of the electoral take. If you choose to try this please make sure you don’t stretch the electrical tape at all, not even a little because it peels up and curls at the edges where it was stretched.  If it is just laid on top and pressed down it does not move.

After all the electrical tape was down it was finished. It was late at night at this point and I took some trash outside.  When I walked back towards the house I looked at the window and it looked really neat. I think anyone who had seen stained glass before could tell what it was supposed to be.

Even better still ”Little Fish” got to see what it was like at night and in the morning when the light shined through the tissue paper and it sent colored light onto the floor and table.  She really enjoyed having the “stained glass”

Materials                     Cost

Tissue paper- left over from previous birthday parties 0.00

Electrical tape –almost had enough laying around 

but I was two glass panes shy so I had to get more    1.00

Clear tape- already had it for home school-            0.00

Total Cost

                               1.00