How to Lead a Harry Potter Potions Class

Let your Harry Potter fans attend an actual potions class, just like at Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, with a few home-made potions and basic science.

First, provide black robes for the instructor and all the students. You can cheat by buying discount black broadcloth and just making make-shift black capes, or ask a local choir to borrow their concert robes. You will have to be responsible for washing all the robes, but all the ingredients in the potions class should wash out without a problem. For more theatrical effects, have the potions instructor don full stage make-up with warts, wrinkles or other effects.

Next, set up a classroom with small tables where student can stand. Give each wizard student a cauldron, either a small cooking pot or clear-glass fish bowls. Provide portioned amounts of all the ingredients for each potion in small paper cups or plastic baggies.

Set up a table to display all the unique ingredients you will use in your potions. A bowl of whole cloves can be rat claws, dried basil can be whomping willow leaves, honey can be ambrosia or armadillo bile. Set out cherry pits to represent bezoars, or the goat stones which protect from most poisons. Rosemary needles can be billywig parts, which in the book are dried insect stings. Yellow Gushers gummy candies can be bubotubers-the plant tubers filled with yellow pus that were supposed to cure acne. Black peppercorns are black beetle eyes, or cockroach eyes. Have a bottle of silver candy dots, used in cake decorating, for doxy eggs. Doxies were the evil fairies that infested draperies and abandoned houses.

Mix extremely overcooked macaroni pasta with water and cornstarch to make a gummy, colloid. Add green and yellow food coloring to make flesh-eating slugs. Keep another cup of cornstarch and water as flobberworm mucus, which Harry Potter's classmates used to thicken potions. Make frog brains from mashed raspberries. Cut tiny circles from discarded panty hose to represent lacewing flies' wings. Provide another cup of colored, down feathers for jobberknoll feathers.

Fine, pale blue glitter works as ground moonstone. Provide actual fresh peppermint leaves as peppermint is an ingredient Harry Potter must purchase for his potions class at Hogwarts. For the die-hard potions fans, provide a can of yellow and pink salmon eggs, available as fish bait, for runespoor eggs, which Harry uses in potions to increase mental ability. Finally, a jar of gummy worms are tubeworms and wispy plant materials make unicorn hair, which Hagrid used to heal wounds because of their strength.

Let your students mix a few practice potions from the ingredients and laugh as they figure out what each one is. Play a guessing game to see if they can figure some out before you tell them.

Now, it's time for the first potion lesson. Give each child a vial of dragon blood (red cabbage juice) and instruct them to mix it in their cauldrons. Theatrically lead them to mix in other ingredients which do not react with the cabbage, like the peppermint, rat's claws and billywig parts. Then explain that the final ingredient is ground unicorn horn, a very powerful, magical ingredient. When mixed in the potion, it will reveal which potion-makers are harboring dark secrets. Pass out small cups of baking soda mixed with clear glitter. Pass out different cups of flour with clear glitter. Each child gets one cup of either baking soda or flour, but don't tell the children they are different. On the count of the three, everyone in the class adds their unicorn powder to the potions. The children with baking soda will have bubbling potions that turn from red to black. The flour will simply mix in with the red cabbage juice and not change colors or bubble. Act shocked at the children's potions that change and bubble. Ask them what their dark secrets are and warn them about the dangers of dark magic.

Next, have everyone clean out their cauldrons. Begin again with unicorn powder (except this time everyone gets baking soda and glitter). Let children decide which ingredients to add based on the potion you are making. Finally, give everyone a vial of dragon spit (vinegar) and watch as everyone's potion erupt in bubbles and fizz.