We were very shocked when we arrived at school just before the holidays to see that the portrait of the Fat Lady had disappeared and the background was destroyed. There was torn paper all over the floor and hanging from the door. The Fat Lady portrait guards the entrance to the Gryffindor common room. Noone can get into the common room without giving her the correct password.

Read the newspaper reports about this shocking attack.

Rio Fat Lady     Georgie Fat Lady     Bobby Fat Lady     Amy Fat Lady

“Boggarts like dark, enclosed spaces….Wardrobes, the gap beneath beds, the cupboards under sinks….

It’s a shape-shifter, it can take the shape of whatever it thinks will frighten us most….”

The only way to defeat a boggart is to turn it into something funny and to laugh at it.

We found a boggart in our classroom cupboard. The cupboard kept shaking and rattling. Mrs Brady opened the door and it jumped out and became lots of different scary creatures.

It became a clown until its head was turned upside down. Another clown ended up wearing an old lady’s dress and hat. It turned into a spider seven times, some of these spiders were huge! Lots of the spiders ended up wearing silly clothes, hats and lipsticks, one even ended up wearing roller skates! A mouse turned into a pink and blue rattle and a witch began dancing to Night Fever in size 12 shoes.

We all shouted Riddikulus and laughed until the boggart disappeared.

The guards of the wizard prison, Azkaban are called Dementors. Nobody likes dementors because they suck all of the happiness out of the air. We looked at J.K. Rowling’s descriptions of the dementors and then planned our own stories. We wanted the dtories to be very scary. Mrs Brady helped us to describe how our bodies would react when we are scared by dropping a heavy book onto a table when it was very quiet – we all jumped out of our skins!

When we wrote our descriptions we tried to use similes and interesting adjectives to describe what the dementors look like and how they would make you feel.

Click on the links to read some of our dementor stories:

Michael’s Dementor          Jordan’s Dementor           Phoenix Dementor        Natalie’s Dementor

We had to research owls for our homework. The day we handed it in the owl rangers came in and taught us about owls. Everyone had to pick bones out of pellets we all loved it. We made pictures of the owl we researched we used feathers and everyone was sneezing.

We have been making the shops of Diagon Alley. We started by making plans of what they would look like. The next step was to make the outside with big cardboard boxes and bits of junk. After that we made the inside using smaller bits of junk and even some nuts.

We love listening to the “Prisoner of Azkaban” and we are enjoying examining the vocabulary J.K.Rowling uses to describe the magical world.

The names of the characters and places in the book all have interesting meanings. Sirius means “Dog Star”, Hagrid means “giant”.

Some of the characters in the Harry Potter stories are horrible. We looked for evidence about the personalities of Harry’s family and friends and wrote character studies to describe them.

As we read each chapter we are looking at the vocabulary the author uses to describe the magical world. We especially like the description of the Knight Bus, as “violently purple”.

On our vocabulary hunt we found interesting nouns and adjectives, verbs and adverbs and interesting descriptions. We then looked up difficult vocabulary.

In History of Magic lessons we are learning about Harry Potter and the Wizard war against Voldemort. We have been reading about Sirius Black, an escaped convict who murdered 13 people and was sent to Azkaban, the wizard prison. We wrote newspaper reports about his escape and designed wanted posters, warning the public about Black.

In potions we are carrying out experiments to find out the properties of the ingredients in our potions store. This week we were investigating acids and alkalis. We tested some of the ingredients using ph paper and a ph scale to find out which were acidic and which are alkaline. If the paper turned orange or red it was an acid, if it turned blue or purple it was an alkali, green means neutral.

We have had some interesting visitors in our class to help us learn to care for magical creatures. Trevor was found in Professor Brady’s garden. We all thought he was a frog at first, but after finding out about frogs and toads we decided he is actually a toad because he has rough, bumpy skin.

On Friday three more magical creatures came to visit. Alison and Cathy from the Countryside Rangers brought a tawny owl, a barn owl and a long eared owl to visit. They told us about the creature features of owls which help them to hunt for tiny prey in the dark. They also brought us some owl pellets to dissect. At first we thought this was disgusting but we got very excited every time we found a tiny animal bone in the hairy pellets, we found hundreds. We didn’t want this activity to end!

As soon as we were sorted into our Hogwarts houses we began restoring Hogwarts. We have made stained glass windows of the house crests. When the sun shines the windows cast colourful images on the floor which we love to dance in.

The Hogwarts Library