As with any book of essays written by a variety of authors, this book was hit or miss. Some of the essays were very good - the Rule-Breaking essay in particular was good for discussing HP with my kids. But some of them were exceedingly boring.

I'm honestly a bit disappointed by this book. I'm an elementary school teacher who was expecting cool hands-on teaching strategies, but instead, found a book of essays geared toward middle, high school, and college teachers. Literally, the word 'elementary' has only three results in the index, and none of them generate ideas or focus extensively on elementary classroom teaching, making the title pretty inaccurate. There are plenty of resources for an HP-filled classroom on Pinterest and other websites that are far more practical and helpful than the essays in this book.

"From Hogwarts Academy..." - exceptionally disjointed and not very interesting. It seemed like an undergrad's attempt at trying to sell their self "And I did this, and this, and then I did this..." Very long-winded for having so little content of value.

"The Nuances of Rule-Breaking" This was actually very interesting and offered lots of useful advise for reading HP with younger children.

"Harry Potter and the Child with Autism" Personally, as someone who has been diagnosed as being on the "spectrum" I found this highly insulting. She offers out-dated advice that is directly contradicted by those of us with autism (the person-first classification is a big one - it highlights the disorder, creates awkward word-usage and stigmatizes the individual. We don't say "a person with blonde hair" we say "blonde." This person-first crap is only sponsored by over-zealous PC social justice warriors who don't bother - you know - asking the people about how they feel being labeled that way). She also hides her son's autism from him, reinforcing the stigma and the idea that this is something to be ashamed of. She also detailed her intentions to have a "coming-out" party. Personally, I find this highly insulting and degrading. Similar to the "Conjoined Fetus Lady" episode of South Park (believe it or not, it's exceptionally apt for how many people with disabilities get treated in completely ridiculous ways). She also lauds Jenny McCarthy for her autism activism. Oh yay, let's celebrate a woman who claimed autism was worse than death and continues to teach the world heinous mis-conceptions about autism.

Section 2 had little (if anything) to do with actually teaching Harry Potter and instead documents the difficulties people might have with HP because of religious convictions. ( )

I'm not sure what happened but I added this book and reviewed it last year. So here we go again. Admittedly it has been a year now since I read it so it's not as fresh on my mind. I enjoyed this book. The harry Potter series took the world by storm. It didn't matter if you were six or sixty, this series broadened and shaped our imaginations in unbelievable ways. It was great to read essays that other people had wrote on how it influenced their life. It's a great read and would recommend it to anyone. ( )

i found parts of the book to be very informative but other parts i found that the person was just trying to push there religions views on to the reader and this turned me off to the book. ( )