Religious Education
As a Church of England School, Religious Education has a special place in our curriculum. Every class has one RE lesson each week. These lessons follow the agreed R.E. syllabus of the Ely Diocese. This is now being taught through the Emmanuel Project 2020 agreed syllabus.
Our RE work not only covers the teaching and stories of Christianity, but also investigates other World religions. Lessons always start with a "Big Question", encouraging children to share their own thoughts and ideas, no matter what those are, and to listen to the views of others. They are always times of lively, open discussion and debate. As part of this RE curriculum, as the children progress through school, we visit different places of worship, including those of different Christian denominations and those of other religions.
As well as timetabled RE lessons, there will always be other times in the curriculum where big questions of faith arise, such as when looking at natural disasters, Space or the Second World War. We make time and space to discuss these questions as they occur, not in any prescriptive way, but in a manner so as to allow the children to investigate their own and others opinions and beliefs.
As a school, we believe it is extremely important for all teachers and learners to develop a mutual respect and tolerance of those with different beliefs, religions and values. We work hard to build this into all our RE lessons and promote British Values.
Pupils are given the opportunity to explore the practices and beliefs of those from the Christian, Jewish, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism and Humanism faiths. Key strands are explored across all faiths to find the similarities and differences between them – for example, Beliefs and Questions, Special Books, Leaders and Teachers and others.
To enable our children to understand the different aspects of their learning in our RE lessons we use the enquiry cycle with ‘Learning ABOUT religion’ and ‘Learning FROM religion’ at its core.
Evidencing Work in RE
During the academic year 2018-2019 we piloted and explored class scrapbooking as a method for recording the children’s work in RE. This proved to be a very successful way to show-case the high standard of work.
In terms of marking these books, lots of the feedback is given verbally as these books are made with the class and there will be less formal written marking. However, progress should be clearly evidenced as we will complete a ‘cold task’ piece of work at the start of the book and a ‘hot task’ piece at the end. This will usually involve the class being given the enquiry question for that unit and being asked to share what they know already and what they want to learn as the hot task. When the unit has been taught fully, it will be expected that children can fully answer the enquiry question and explain the learning they have done. This is known as the hot task.
Impact
We believe that RE teaching is thorough, methodical and well evidenced. Pupils enjoy RE at St Christopher’s and value the importance of this subject. They achieve well and assessment systems are well established.