2019-2020 Curriculum Picks – Waldock’s Wizards and Wands

by | Jul 30, 2019 | Uncategorized

I have been excited about this curriculum since the day Jessica told me about it! If you are not following my good friend Jessica Waldock over at @thewaldockway on Instagram, you need to head on over and click that “follow” button! She has so many amazing curriculums available and fills all the voids in our homeschool always! Jessica is incredible at putting unit studies and morning baskets together.

I’m so excited to share this curriculum with you!

Waldock’s Wizards and Wands

Jessica has put together a curriculum for families to use along side the Harry Potter books! I’ve been in love with Harry Potter for more than half of my life now and have been waiting and waiting for Lilly Belle to be old enough so I could share the magic with her. Since she was born we have some serious Harry Potter rules in our house, number 1 being that she is not allowed to watch the movies until she has read the books. Rule number 2 now that we live in the Orlando area and have our Universal Annual Passes…she has not been allowed on any Harry Potter attractions until she has read the first book.

So. It’s a big deal for us. This is going to be a magical school year. Literally!

Our family is going to be using Waldock’s Wizards and Wands a bit differently than it is written because Lilly Belle is 6 (as of this coming Sunday)  so she is a bit young for some of the games and things included. I’m excited to share with you here how our family will be using this curriculum this year. We have added our Harry Potter time into our loop schedule for our afternoons together.

Read Alouds

We will read about 2-3 chapters each week. I’m not in any hurry to rush through these books with her. We may also bring our book with us for some special mommy-daughter time and head to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter to drink Butterbeer and read together.

We will also be reading the Zoey and Sassafrass series over again and doing a lot of projects and activities for each of the books.

I’m super excited about one of the newest Usborne Books and More releases, Polly and Buster! There are two books in this series about a witch and her monster friend. We just started reading Book One and it’s the cutest. We will be doing some activities along with this as well!

We are also going to be reading an adorable series that Jessica has included in the curriculum with the titles: The Courage of Cat Campbell, The Marvelous Magic of Miss Mabel, and The Power of Poppy Pendle.

Spells, Charms, Incantations and Enchantments

For charms, Jessica has included amazing quotes for copy work. The curriculum includes writing pages for the children to use with the quotes typed out for them. Lilly Belle is too little to write on regular lined paper yet, she still loves working on her handwriting. So I actually went and copied by hand the quotes that Jessica included onto the Handwriting Without Tears paper that Lilly Belle uses. This way she is getting handwriting work in using the curriculum we use for handwriting. And still gets to pull in our magic!

For spells, it is the same except instead of copy work, it is dictation. I will read a sentence from the book to her and she will write it on the Handwriting Without Tears lined paper we have.

For enchantments, the curriculum has us focusing on narration. Lilly Belle loves this! Jessica has pages included for your child to use. We are going to be using our computer. Lilly Belle loves it when I type out what she says to me. She is able to narrate so much more this way.

For incantations we are using a few of the (many) writing projects that Jessica has included in the curriculum. A few that I am most excited about Lilly Belle doing include things like writing her own Daily Prophet news articles and creating her own wand. We will probably do many Daily Prophet articles. I may have her do those writing about our adventures to Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter each time we go.

Science

Our main focus this year with Waldock’s Wizards and Wands are reading the books (obviously), a bit of the language arts, field trips to Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but most of all… for SCIENCE! This curriculum is our main science curriculum. We are using it 100% as our science spine this year! We have chosen 4 of the science units to include for Lilly Belle; Alchemy (rocks and minerals), Astronomy, Herbology (botany), and Potions (chemistry/experiments). We are not doing Muggle Studies this year (history) from this curriculum because we are using Jessica’s Passport to Adventures curriculum for history. We are also skipping the Magical Creatures study because Lilly Belle is taking an Animals class at her day school each week.

The way we will be getting it into our schedule is when we have “science” come up on our Loop Board, Lilly Belle will choose a unit to study. We will get out that tub from our shelf and just sit for as long as she would like learning about all the things in that tub: reading, playing games, doing experiments. I won’t stop her and she has the full two hours of our loop to work on that if she would like for that day. Then the next time “science” comes up on our Loop Board my only request from her will be that she chooses a different tub to learn from so we are always switching up the topics all year long. But by the end of the school year she will have an extreme amount of knowledge about rocks and minerals, botany, space and experiments and chemistry!

I will not be linking everything here in this post because so much of this was Jessica’s time and hours spent finding these incredible resources and linking them in her curriculum. You can find the links for these in the Waldock’s Wizards and Wands curriculum. If it is not from her curriculum, and I have found it myself, I have linked it here below. Jessica did an incredible job putting this all together!

I also want to note, for each of these units, Jessica has included a ton of printables to make each study SO rich! I did not take photos of those here, but I am going to be doing a curriculum flip through on my Instagram and keeping it as a highlight in my stories.

Herbology

Lilly Belle is loving the Wildcraft game and Herb Fairies. I have a feeling that when it comes time to do our science loop on our Loop Board she is going to as for Herbology the majority of the time! We are also working on our garden again. Our spring garden didn’t make it. It was our first garden and we got so much basil and baby tomatoes from it, but our Florida storms have sadly ruined it. So we’ll be starting from scratch and she’s excited about that.

Here is a list of resources that we have added to use for Herbology this year along with the incredible resources Jessica has included (any links not found here can be found in Jessica’s Waldock’s Wizards and Wands):

Astronomy

Our family is always excited about space! We live in a place where learning about space is so real and right in front of us. With Nasa just about an hour away from our house and so many space learning opportunities at Walt Disney World (our backyard) we are always surrounded by space education and it’s amazing. We can see all the rocket launches right from our front door.

Jessica has included some amazing space resources and I’ve added to it and tweaked the space unit study to work for our family. That’s the beauty of curriculum. You can use it as an incredible base and then make it work for your family! Here are the additions we have added for Lilly Belle this year:

(see how much I love space – I’ve already created FOUR space units in our shop!)

For field trips on this unit we will be hanging out at Disney’s Epcot in the Mission Space attraction wait area. There is really fun playground for the kids to play on after you go on the attraction. Lilly Belle loves to ride Mission Space and pretend she is a really astronaut on a mission to Mars!

And of course – we will be visiting NASA as often as we can. We went last summer and it was one of my favorite family days ever. We got to touch a piece of the moon, see full size rockets, meet and talk to an astronaut who was in space THREE times and so much more. It makes me want to cry with excitement when I think about it! You can also have lunch with an astronaut – we should add that for next visit!

Alchemy

I’ll be honest. This unit is the one I was least excited about. Learning about rocks? Doesn’t sound super fun. Until I started to dive in and see all the fun things Jessica has included and started to really think about how much of our world IS rocks and minerals (ummm…..right lol?) and then realized we NEED to learn about this and we CAN make it fun. We are going to extend our Alchemy study to include volcanoes as well, I haven’t added those resources yet. We will be doing a huge Hawaii study at the end of our school year as I am an Usborne consultant and AM going to earn the Hawaii trip this year. It’s my number one mission and if I keep going at the rate I am, I’ll have the trip earned for free for our family soon! So – volcano study is a must!

I am so glad that Jessica added this into the curriculum, because without it here in front of me, it would never have been something I would have chosen to learn about with Lilly Belle. It is completely new for both of us. I remember learning about rocks and minerals in 6th grade and just not caring. So here is what we plan on doing and the additions we’ve added to the amazingness Jessica has included in her Waldock’s Wizards and Wands curriculum!

Next to our house we have a super touristy place where there are little gift shop. It’s filled with all kinds of rocks and gems. We are going to be going there often to get new rocks for our collection!

Potions

Lilly Belle is way excited about this unit. For potions we aren’t getting too “witchcraft” on this (because I just don’t have room in our apartment for fun apothecary jars filled with fun – we’ll have fun seeing what they have at Universal), but instead are using it as our study on chemistry and science experiments! Lilly Belle will be getting some science experiment kits for her birthday and Christmas this year and we will be having fun with those! She is also getting the game Cauldron Quest for her birthday and she’s going to love that.

Jessica has included so many amazing resources for potions. Here are the ones we’ve added in for this year’s Potions unit:

Owl Post

We have some pen pals for our Owl Post; Emily (Jessica from @thewaldockway) and Mila (Kristen from @whisktangofox) . Lilly Belle got to meet Emily in “real life” at the homeschool convention this year and the two of them had so much fun together all weekend! Mila is Lilly Belle’s real-life best friend so they see each other all the time and Kristen and Mila are also using Waldock’s Wizards and Wands curriculum for First Grade this year! It’s going to be fun to have friends using this curriculum alongside us.

We purchased some stationary from Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter as well as ink and a feather quill pen for Lilly Belle. We also purchased these fun Harry Potter Coloring Postcards to use when writing letters to her friends.

We visited Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Lilly Belle got her wand, robe, school supplies and…owl!

There are so many more aspects of the Waldock’s Wizards and Wands curriculum that we aren’t touching on this year. We will be using this curriculum for years since I’m going to want to do it with Lucy and Liam as well when they’re each old enough. In our home it will be a fun thing they get to do for First Grade like they’re First Years. Lilly Belle will then become Prefect and we’ll just keep having fun with it. It’s going to be amazing being so close to Universal and going there as often as we do!

Once Lilly Belle has finished each book, she will also be allowed to watch the movie for that book and then “unlocks” attractions at Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter!

We are so excited to start our school year and I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about science before! Jessica also has a Facebook group for everyone who has purchased the curriculum and it’s so much fun to see how families are using this curriculum. It’s amazing what these moms are coming up with. My little Harry Potter shelf is nothing compared to their Harry Potter school rooms filled with amazingness! It’s fun to see and a have community.

To Purchase: WALDOCK’S WIZARDS AND WANDS

 

 

 

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