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FORTY FORT — Oh, that Aunt Petunia! Uncle Vernon and cousin Dudley, too!
For 10-year-old Doron Glynn, those annoying characters made the first few pages of “Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone” decidedly not fun.
“I didn’t like it at first, how they treated Harry,” Doron said Friday morning at Wyoming Seminary Lower School, where he is in fifth grade. “They put him in a cupboard to sleep. But now that he’s at Hogwarts I’m really starting to like it … I love it.”
Doron and about 30 classmates are making their way through the first Harry Potter book together, taking turns reading it aloud during Jennifer Green’s literacy class.
“The sorting hat just put him into Gryffindor,” 10-year-old Mirabaai Reistma said, indicating the class is at the part where Harry has just found out which of four houses will be his home away from home at Hogwarts, the school for young wizards and witches where he will spend the next few years.
Speaking of Hogwarts, Wyoming Seminary fifth-graders are experiencing the Harry Potter saga in a hands-on way, thanks to collaboration between Green and science teacher John Eidam, who has organized the building of a 6,020-piece replica of the Hogwarts castle.
“I just like how it’s so huge,” 11-year-old Billy Hall said as he took a 10-minute turn at a construction table in Eidam’s classroom, where four students at a time worked in teams of two.
Ten-year-old Troy Pryor said he’d like to be an engineer someday, and sees the Lego project as good practice. “Very much so,” he said.
The students, who expect to work on the project through several upcoming Friday mornings, already had built the room where a basilisk, or giant serpent, was just waiting to cause trouble and the room where Harry’s friend Ron Weasley is destined to win a live-size chess match.
The whomping tree outside the castle seemed to be completed, as well. Just as its name indicates, that tree can be hazardous if you get too close. Yet to be constructed were lots of turrets and Hogwarts’ famous floating staircases.
“It would be fun” to ascend a floating staircase, 10-year-old Zsofia Vargo surmised. “But you wouldn’t get where you wanted to go.”
While they awaited their turns to assemble more bricks with those satisfying Lego snaps, other students worked on other homework or read various other books from the fantasy genre, including Katherine Paterson’s “Bridge to Terabithia,” C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and Madeleine L’Engle Camp’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” which Green said they’re reading at their own pace.
Several fifth-graders sported jagged lightning bolt shapes on their foreheads, representing the scar Harry carries, but a few opted instead for a “deathly hallows” symbol of triangle, circle and line on their wrists.
Eleven-year-old Chloe Hedaya chose the wrist mark because, she confided in a whisper, “I didn’t really want anything on my face.”
Later, as two stymied students told Eidam they were having trouble finding the next piece to attach to their corner of Hogwarts, he showed them a picture of what it should look like. “We need a little gray guy over here.”
While the avid Lego builder wants his students to do most of the work themselves, Eidam admitted, “the hardest part is not diving in to help.”
