Session One (Welcome to Year 8) - Saturday 24th November 2012

24th November 2012 was a busy day for ESIP as we welcomed not only a new Year 8 group but also their parents to the Headmistress' Welcome Breakfast.

Mrs Penny Goodman, Head of Forest Girls' School opened the event and talked about the role Forest School plays in ESIP. Dr Simon Davey, Programme Leader explained the vision for ESIP and the role we play in developing ability, belief and character to raise aspirations, achievement, learning capability and resilience. After brief contributions from Dona Henriques and Fidelma Boyd, Deputy Head of St Angela's, two of our ESIP Year 9s (Mia and Maya) talked about the benefits they had gained from ESIP Year 8 last year.

Meanwhile all 30 new Year 8s were getting to know each other in the Girls School Hall through icebreakers.

We kicked off Year Eight with the Induction session - an introduction to ESIP with exercises in the Big 5 skills, learning capability and a series of videos. We played with modelling clay and party poppers to demonstrate the malleability of our brains (and our capability to develop new skills and abilities through practice and effort whatever the extent or our current ability) and how our brains create those new synaptic connections.

In our Inner Hedgehog exercise, we thought about what we were passionate about, what we could become excellent at and what might make us money in the future. This exercise will help shape our ambitions and future opportunities.

After break (and some creative activity with the modelling clay) we headed off to the Ways of Seeing session led by Miss Spencer-Ellis and Miss O'Sullivan.

Ways of Seeing focused on two of the Big 5 skills - creative thinking and critical thinking. We learned about perspectives (and challenged our perspectives) and we interpreted some paintings (and discussed how our interpretations were different to the artists). We brainstormed ideas and we created a poem each. By the end we had a better understanding of the different views of art and poetry and flexed our creative muscles.

• “I have become more confident. When I first got told to write a poem I was quite worried about what to write but when I got into it I was no longer worried. This will make a difference so I don’t give up on something even if I don’t have much experience in it.”

At the end of the day we had Reflection Time, an opportunity to consider what we had learned and set ourselves some challenges to build on that learning in advance of the next session. 

See the gallery of photos from the day.