In the theme of Harry Potter, I asked the Blue Sky question:

How Do The Components Of A Wand Effect Its Functionality?

To show the information I gained from this project, I made a wand for each of my PLP teachers that best represents their personalities.

When creating the wands, I took the personality of the user and the type of spells they would most likely cast into consideration.

I found all of the woods I used in my uncles garage. Here are the woods I found that best suited my teachers:

1. Ms.Willemes: Fir-Acaia
2. Mr.Hughes: Jatoba
3. Mr.Fetherstone: English oak
4. Ms.Pye: Mahogany.

Once I knew which wood would compose their wands, I had to find out their cores. To do this I created a quiz on “playbuzz.com”. It included the following questions;

• Do you consider yourself one of a kind?
• What do you value in a friend?
• What is your best quality?
• Where would you spend most of your time in Hogwarts?
• If you where at a three-way cross road would you go left towards the school, right towards the town, or straight towards the castle?

Once each teacher took the survey, I receive the following results:

1. Mr.Hughes had White River Monster as his wand core.
2. Ms.Willemse had the rare Phoenix Feather.
3. Mr.Featherstone and Ms. Pye had Dragon Heart String which is one of the most common yet most powerful cores available.

Next, I began to make the wands with a Spoke Shave.

This is a tool that people used in Medieval times to make spokes for wagon wheels however its still used today for wood working projects.

It makes the hard work of carving a piece of wood into a cylinder shaped piece of word easier.

I then embellished the wands by doing a few things:

1. I wanted to burn some marks into the wands but because I could not find my wood burning tool, I applied ink from an old printer cartridge to the wood which gave it the same effect as burning the wood.
2. I used a lighter to char holes into one of the wands.
3. For all the wands, I applied mineral oil to them to give them a nice, natural finish that kept the natural colour of the wood.

 

 

Then I began to create the layout of the wand frames:

 

 

PROJECT DETAILS
Project Question: How do the components of a wand affect its functionality?

I. WAND:
This is the item I am making to answer my Blue Sky question.

II. COMPONENTS:

1. The wood the wand is made out of,
2. The core in the wand, and
3. The length of the wand.

III. FUNCTIONS:

1.Wizard the wand picks
2. Spell casting capabilities.

IV. PROJECT THEME:

All things Harry Potter.

V. TIMELINE
I created a very good timeline to ensure that I stay on track with my work (see below).
VI. EXHIBIT

I created a poster board that outlined my project.

I tea-stained the information sheets so that they had a real magic/old Victorian feel.

I mounted and framed each wand in a glass covered frame and I inserted detailed specifications for each wand.

The only thing left to do was set-up our exhibition area. My group’s theme for its exhibition area (which was in the Library) was the Gryffindor common room during Christmas. To bring our exhibition area alive,  we hung Christmas decorations on some of the walls, strung Christmas lights from the ceiling, covered the walls in red paper, and set-up a comfy seating area. In the seating area, we had a chest that contained all of the contents of a chest for a student studying at Hogwarts, with a few special items (invisibility cloak, Mauders Map, wand and Gryffindor Robe). My group also dressed in Gryffindor uniforms. We also needed an interactive activity, so we created “Pin the Scar on Harry” and some sort of refreshments. We served lickerish wands (twizzlers), Bertybots every flavoured beans (jelly beans), and dragons milk with condensed clouds (egg nog with whip cream).

The most challenging part of all of this project was making Mr. Featherstone’s wand – English Oak is really hard to work with and it did not go well on my first two tries. But the third worked well – instead of using the Spoke Shave to carve it fully, I only used it to round it out and then used a knife to whittle it down.
I made the handle by using some wood from the first attempt.

I loved this project and enjoyed making the wands. Once I had the survey results and wood researched, the project took on a life of its own and I worked for hours on the wands without even realizing how much time I was spending on them. This is sort of what Mr. Hughes told us it should be like – a good Blue Sky question is one that drives you to answer it. That is what this project was for me.