Harry Potter Party: The Great Hall and the Sorting Hat Ceremony

This is the 5th in a series of posts about our Harry Potter Birthday Party. You can read our other posts at the links below:

The Hogwarts Acceptance Letter
Invitation and Costumes
The Guests Arrive
Diagon Alley

Once the guests had purchased all their supplies in Diagon Alley, they were escorted into the Great Hall where they participated in the Sorting Hat Ceremony.

I found some great ideas for decorating my living room here.

The hanging candles were super easy and inexpensive to make. I just purchased battery-operated tea light candles and then wrapped white copy paper around them using double sided tape. Then I attached invisible fishing line to the candle flame and hung them with tacks from the ceiling. I had to use a letter opener to turn the light on when I was ready to hang them!

I made the banners that I hung above the fireplace with felt purchased at Hobby Lobby.

I bought all the tea light candles that I lit everywhere at a local dollar store.

I purchased the Sorting Hat from Amazon. I loved that the hat had a pocket inside to hold a walkie talkie.

Sorting Hat

My son Joseph was outside the house on the deck peeking in the window to see which guests were seated on the stool for sorting. He was holding the other half of the walkie talkie and he would dramatically announce the house for each guest. I think the magical sorting hat voice was my nephew Cameron's favorite part of the party. He kept asking how the sorting hat talked!

Joseph would give a brief list of the qualities of the student such as loyal, smart, brave etc. and then he would announce their house.

We had decided to  limit our houses to two: Gryffindor and Ravenclaw so that the two teams could compete against each other in Quidditch.

Once the party guest was sorted into his or her house, I would pin on their house ties.

I had made each guest a house tie with felt from Hobby Lobby. Each tie cost less than .50 cents to make. (I am starting to think that Hobby Lobby should sponsor my Harry Potter posts!!)

They made each guest look awesome with the house ties on top of the white shirts that we had asked them to wear.

This also helped us to tell the houses apart in our Quidditch game!

Once everyone had been sorted and dressed in their house ties, Dumbledore gave a brief first year speech: ( Nitwit, Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!) and then announced their first class.... Potions!! Stay tuned for our next post about the Potions class.

If you don't want to go to all the hoopla with the sorting hat, here is a fun sorting hat quiz that I created for our Hogwarts Summer Fun Challenge.

I think it would be fun to sort the guests using this sorting hat quiz.
The answer key is given below the quiz on the Google Drive document. Which house are you in?

Sorting Hat Quiz