I never got a chance to write about that very special day in November when the entire school turned into Harry Potter land for a day! It was a magical adventure that the entire school embarked on. Teachers, parent volunteers, principal, secretaries, custodians, and last, but not least, students, came together to celebrate each other and enjoy being transported to an imaginary world for a day! There was lots of work, but also lots of laughter and immense satisfaction for a job well done! I could not possibly showcase here the enthusiasm and beauty of that day, but it is my hope that snippets of our fun were captured in these pictures below.
The main entrance was set up as the 9 3/4 platform in London and a luggage trolley {read in British} equipped with student suitcases and the staple owl cage was ready to transport the students into the magical land of Hogwarts. The main hallway was decorated with the four house flags and some of Dolores Umbridge’s nasty decrees!
There are four main corridors in our school and each one was assigned a house from Harry Potter. The first hallway to the right was Gryffindor. Letters shooting out of a fireplace were the confirmation that all our students were admitted and welcomed to Hogwarts!
The opposite hallway was given to the loyal house of Hufflepuff! Flying Nimbus 3000 brooms were hanging from the ceiling awaiting for any courageous young boys or girls to tests their abilities!
A spiral staircase decorated with portraits of forefathers, house heads, and teachers from the past, took the visitors to the bottom level. If one was skilled enough to make it past the whomping willow, a whole new world was revealed to their eyes. To the right, the visitor was welcomed to the herbology class that lead to the fine and clever house of Ravenclaw!
To the left, the visitor was cautioned by a big sign that they were about to enter the ambitious house of Slytherin where their sly snake was reigning!
As for my room, I decided to turn it into a potions class. I am not sure how or when I came up with this idea, but it was very clear in mind that I was going to be professor McGonagall in for professor Snape who had gone missing! A letter was left behind by professor Snape with instructions for the students about what their quest was and then it all unfolded from there: if the students could figure out the exact combination for an invisibility potion, they could test it onto themselves and become invisible for a few seconds! You could imagine how exciting that was for my students! The older ones, as anticipated, were very skeptical that they could become invisible, but the little ones could not wait to try it! And they succeeded! {I used an invisibility cloak my own kids had in their closet from a few Christmases back… Needless to say, my students minds were blown away when they saw their own pictures of heads and no bodies!}
The decor was simple. A backdrop that transported everyone into professor Snape’s classroom was easy to purchase from Amazon. As for Snape’s extensive collection of books and potions, I used Dollar store vases wrapped in washi paper and filled with various items, such as plastic lizards, miniature snakes, cotton balls, pieces of wood, glow in the dark Halloween bats, black feathers, etc. The labels were purchased from Etsy and modge podged on. The cool factor was added by this sake bottle I purchased 13 years ago when we lived in Japan from a sake distillery. The bottle contains a real snake on the bottom and it is a fancy item sold in many of the local Okinawan stores under the name of HABU SAKE.
As always, the activities I had planned for my students were both for reading and math, and targeted my students’ IEP goals.
