We recently took part in a Superheroes Challenge Day for all new Year 7 students to our school. The aim was to ensure the students talked with children joining Kingswood from other schools. Throughout the day they worked on team challenges which enabled them to “gel” together as a Year Group.

>In the Library we opted for a critical thinking challenge. Students had to create their own superheroes outlining their strengths and weaknesses, their safe and dangerous habitats, their outfits and their gadgets. Each team’s Superhero then faced their rivals in a series of Scenarios we had created for them.

I used the Trading Card Creator on the Readwritethink website. We had 5 categories for the scenarios – who, what, where, when and why. The challenges ranged from alien attacks to zoo animal escapes. Sadly Ice Slasher met his demise in the Volcano challenge even though he had a heatproof shield!

It was interesting to see the strategies used to compensate for each superheroes fatal flaw. Some teams gave their heroes very specific flaws (e.g being allergic to pineapples) which they hoped would not come up in any of the challenges. At the other extreme heroes had special powers that were so all-embracing they could face up to anything e.g Shapeshifting. A lot of the teams didn’t prepare for their hero to time travel though which left them kicking their heels rather than visiting the Egyptian pyramids with Howard Carter in 1922.

Our favourite Superhero was Lobsterman. His back story was that he became a superhero when his parents got cooked in Paella! His special power was the ability to squirt corrosive wee and his dangerous territory was, naturally enough, Spanish food restaurants His body armour i.e. his lobster shell had teleporting powers and his gadget allowed him to talk to animals to persuade them not to harm him. That pretty much covers every scenario I think!

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Although we had to close the library to other students for a whole day we got to know the new students meeting all 90 of them and it was a great way to start. We have since followed on with more formal induction through their English lessons.