The Ultimate Hogwarts Dinner Event | How To Create Potions Class

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Welcome to the Potions edition of the Ultimate Hogwarts Dinner Event series!

Recently I was part of a team who turned our church into Hogwarts for a youth event. We decked out the entire building in Harry Potter magic, and for 2 hours the kids were students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In this series I’m sharing how we set up each classroom, and the activities we held in them. Be sure to check out the rest of the series by clicking the links at the end of this post.

“As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through the human veins, bewitching the minds, ensnaring the senses… I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even stopper death – if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.” – Professor Snape in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Can we just pause for a moment and appreciate the word ‘dunderhead’? Brilliant. And moving on.

Potions class in our Hogwarts event was definitely, 100%, without a doubt, the most messy and the most stinky class of them all. If it could win an award for the most outrageously untidy, it would. Thank to goodness I was not in charge of this room. It was set up in one of the lower basement rooms of the church, one which is usually used for the young kids during the services. It was quite a large room, and we had multiple tables set up in side (and a wooden floor for easy clean up!).

Potions Decor

The potions room had a brilliant set up. At one end of the room there was a table with shelving, and draped with black material. Sitting on it were various bottles of exciting looking things, very much like what you might expect in an actual options class. There were also candles, and one of the options text books. On the side wall there was a similar one set up, with vials and jars full of goodness knows what.

There were two tables set up in the middle of the room, one for making potions, and the other for making Polyjuice. I had made 3 text books with ‘recipes’ in them, and we propped them up on wooden book stands, one on each table.

Potions Activity

The potions text books consisted simply of a recipe that had been made up, which we then types and printed onto parchment, and stuck into an old cook book that I found at the second hand store. On one of them I printed a spine for, just in case the kids picked them up, but I don’t think they did.

For the recipes, we looked at what the ‘real’ ingredients for Polyjuice were, and pretty much copied those. We then created different liquids and powders and placed them in jars, labled with words like fluxweed, knotgrass and boomslang skin. For the generic potions table, there was a standard base potion which they made (out of various coloured water with food colouring), and then they added to to create their desired potion. For example if they added “clippings of Gillyweed and 2 mermaid scales” they would be able to breath underwater, or if the added ‘5 dried magpie eyes and 2 drops of Felix Felicis’ it would help them see the future. Nothing official, just plan fun really.

They were graded on whether they followed instructions and successfully made the potions, failed if they didn’t complete it.

Alternative activity ideas

Guess the potion: have a list of (drinkable) potions and their flavours, and get them to taste each one blind folder and name the flavours/potions.
Create their own potion by writing a recipe.

There was vinegar involved in this class, so by the end of the night the whole room reeked of it. * vomit noise * The clean was pretty intense, as everything needed washing out and disposing of, but so many of the kids said this was one of their favourite classes.

Check out the rest of the series: