There are many interesting websites on the Internet about J. K. Rowling and her books.There are many possible tasks and activities which can be done in lessons and as homework when you read one of the Harry Potter books in class.

Pupils can search the Internet for biographies and make up their own one about J. K. Rowling. Different kinds of summaries can be found and used to help to write one's own summaries.

You can also learn a lot from the interviews with J. K. Rowling. It is interesting to find out something about the genre and the themes of the books. A lot of criticism has been published, too. It is even exciting to compare and describe the different covers - American and British editions - of the books. Descriptions of characters can be practised, including concrete things as well as abstract things. To understand a character's role, you must look at the character from different points of view: speech (what does the character say?), action (what does the character do?), description (what does the character look like?) and reaction of other characters (how do the other characters react to this character?). You can also make up "similarities and differences" charts for pairs of characters.

The books are full of descriptive vocabulary. It is nice to act out some of these snippets of conversation and to be dramatic, just as you can hear from the audio books read by Stephen Fry, who won a Talkie award for his reading of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. If you like to talk about symbolism, do it! A symbol is usually a real, concrete thing that stands for an abstract idea. It is great fun and not very difficult to find symbols in the Harry Potter books.

You can practise vocabulary definitions. Good definitions tell you two things: what kind of thing it is, and what makes it different from others in that same group of classification. A good definition can also give you a more familiar word that means the same thing, or close to it. Pupils can learn to be more specific.

Quote analysis is a good exercise to understand the books. Identification of the settings and trying to find out the different conflicts between the characters should not be forgotten. Thousands of mythological characters, places, situations, and motifs could be compared to similar components of the Potter series. It is sufficient to recognize some parallels, initiating further interest and analysis and reading of myths, legends and fairy tales. Realizing the importance of the names used in the books can mean hours of extra work!