Spellbound

My kids love the first two Harry Potter books (the only ones they are allowed to read so far). My mother-in-law also loves the Harry Potter books, and this week she was in town and the kids were in Harry Potter heaven. All day long they talked about the things that happened in the books and cast spells. My mother-in-law decided to show the kids how the spells were usually made up of Latin words and the kids were fascinated, so when my inlaws left this morning I decided to keep up the fun and stave off the grandparents-are-gone-cryfest.

 

The kids, with my inlaws, had taken spells from Harry Potter and broken them down into their roots.

 

I ask the kids what spells they wish they could cast. Abby wants to turn someone into a baby. We look up the root of the word baby (I have a dictionary app on my phone and when you search word you can click to get the definition, synonyms, origin, grammar, and “learners” that includes pronunciations, inflections, and common expressions with the word. If you’re interested, the app is literally just called ‘Dictionary’.)

Baby comes from the late 14^th century word baban. Abby gets more specific and takes a Latin word she’s already learned from the Harry Potter spell Oculus Reparo and says, “Reparo baban – you are returned to being a baby.” Briana starts acting like a baby. Abby wants her to say goo-goo-ga-ga, so we look up speak and find it is originated from the Latin loqua, loqu, loquor, dico, dictum, narro, and locutus. Abby likes loqua best with baban and creates the spell “Loquababan!” Abby wants one more baby command so we look up move and crawl and a couple other variations and her favorite is “Movere baban!” to make someone crawl like a baby.

 

I have the girls create a spell book for their new spells.

 

Briana isn’t as into baby stuff as Abby is. She creates:

• Humanus piscis – to turn someone into a human fish aka a mermaid
• Aqua potere – to have water power shoot from your wand
• Eo ire itum Hogwarts – to travel to Hogwarts (or anywhere else with a change of the last word)
• Drit-un – to clean (by adding what needs to be cleaned, like Drit-un dishes!)

I create:

• Mensa ratha – to read people’s minds
• Silentium – to make everyone silent
• Carricare totalis – to make any object that you point your wand at turn into something that carries all of us by itself

 

Then we play for a while and discover that we need some undoing spells. The kids know enough Latin now to create “reparo Briana” to return Briana to herself after she’s been a baby or “humanus wingardium” to make a winged human and “humanus winguardium leviosa” to make that winged human fly.

In fact, in a full hour of playing, only one more Latin word has to be looked up for the kids and a new spell created:

• Grindanan – grounds someone if they are flying

I think that one of the most important classes that I took in middle school was Greek and Latin roots, a class that was very successfully designed to enhance our vocabularies by helping us break down words so that if, at first glance, we had no idea what an ornithologist was on the SAT or whatever, we could at least stop and say, well ornith- is bird, and –ology is study of, and we could make an educated guess about what an ornithologist might do. I really wish I had my old notes from that class and/or that my kids’ school has a class like that (who knows, middle school is eons away for us so I don’t know their curriculum. Maybe they do have a class like that in middle school. I really hope so!).

As long as no one remembers the proper ward technique for “Obliviate!” my kids may just have started to understand how to break big words into root words. We can build on that. A good vocabulary always leaves people spellbound.

<3 Pedigreed Housewife