Welcome to the Poppins Book Nook – a monthly online book club for kids from preschool to high school!
The theme for this month’s Poppins Book Club is wizards!
Whether it’s Merlin, Dumbledore or Morgan LeFay, there are some much loved wizards in children’s literature.
Wizard-ly Books
Or is it Wizarding books? Our family is big on making up words 🙂
Since our goal for the book club is to introduce books that connect with fun activities, we started by hunting down some great stories! I’m also including affiliate links for each of the books so you can learn more about them.
She’s a little young for the Harry Potter series
The Magic Tree House #32: Winter of the Ice Wizard 
A few of the fun non-fiction wizard books we’ve really enjoyed this month include:
My daughter really loves the different sections of these books which include fun information, crafts and activities. The two we read this month had great ideas for crafts and creating potions:
and The Book of Wizard Parties: In Which the Wizard Shares the Secrets of Creating Enchanted Gatherings
In fact, we learned a new word while reading the books — many wizards practiced Alchemy which is an ancient form of chemistry.
Since all wizards seem to have a good knowledge of spells and potions, we thought it would be fun to be a Alchemist and create our own wizard lab!
Create Your Own Wizard Lab
First, we found a few fun ingredients to mix up, along with some great science equipments that we saw in the books we were reading. We also tracked down a few ‘recipes’ from our science books so we could create some potions of our own.
I used some items that are easily found around the house (including affiliate links for lesser known items):
• baking soda
• vinegar
• hydrogen peroxide
• water and
• Isopropyl Alcohol
We decided to experiment with what wizards would use to conjure up some cool tricks and also make ‘Monster Goo’ (also called goop)! For a fun goop recipe, visit our friends at Growing a Jeweled Rose!
And I know what you’re thinking — “Where did you find those cool science items?!!”
A wizard’s lab isn’t complete unless you have things to mix in and Plastic Beakers
While we did discuss some of the science behind mixing various elements, I really just allowed her to try a few different ‘concoctions’ and look at what happened to the various solutions and mixes.
Because really, isn’t that what wizards would do 🙂
It’s great to have a piece of paper and pencil with you to record which items you are mixing along with their reactions.
For even more fun, kids can come up with some magic words (Alacazam is pretty popular) during their mixing of potions.
Also, label your ingredients with cool wizard words — baking soda can be ‘dragon powder’, peroxide can be called ‘witches brew’ and corn starch would be a fun ‘fairy dust’ to mix.
I’m sure you know that mixing baking soda and vinegar will create a very big foamy reaction which can be really fun for a wizards lab. As you can see from our test tube photo, we had some very bubbly mixes that occurred during our lab.
If you’d like to set up your own wizard lab and try some alchemy, kid-sized test tubes and kits such as Lab-in-a-Bag Test Tubes for Kids
For additional science activities the kids will enjoy, try these 27 Simple Science Experiments!
More Wizard Fun
Enjoy some AWESOME wizard activiites & crafts from the Poppins Book Nook bloggers! And we invite you to read and have fun with us so link up your wizard book/activity post this month too!