RE
Religious Education at Townlands Church of England Primary Academy
“A journey of learning in the light of God’s love”
As a church school our principal aim in teaching Religious Education is to promote the spiritual, moral and curriculum development of all our pupils and to give them a firm grounding and sound understanding of the beliefs and practices of Christianity along with other faiths. Religious Education at Townlands is grounded in our school values, even though the values are rooted within the Christian ethos they apply to all religions and non-religious beliefs. Our values make for good citizens in our ever changing world.
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Half Termly RE Newsletters
Why do we teach RE?
Townlands has adopted Understanding Christianity (RE Today Services) and Leicestershire Religious Literacy for All (The agreed syllabus for Religious Education 2016-2021). We also weave into this curriculum our diverse staff expertise and our Christian ethos and values.
The Religious Education curriculum at Townlands aims to increase our pupils’ knowledge of religion and belief, locally, nationally and globally. We aim to expose children to a rich vocabulary so that they can confidently and articulately discuss the above. As a school we try our best to deliver learning in an inspiring way through art, music, drama as well as through discussion and more formal writing opportunities.
By using progressive planning, we can build on prior knowledge in order to achieve breadth and understanding. Through the curriculum we also intend to increase pupils’ capacity to consider thoughtfully, deeply and personally the nature of religion and worldviews including their own ideas, beliefs, values and communities.
Our intent is to provide an academic RE curriculum that enables pupils to hold balanced and informed conversations about religions and worldviews.
How do we deliver the curriculum?
Through the curriculum at Townlands we aim to aspire children to have many views rather than limiting them to singular thinking, we try and achieve this by making the resources open to varied interpretations in order to increase our pupils understanding. By building understanding we make sure that the children understand and use specialist vocabulary, therefore as a school we prioritise vocabulary and award it with high importance in order to aid learning. Our learning tasks are delivered in a wide variety of ways so that the children can become articulate at discussing, imagining and arguing and become profound in their insights.
We use a range of strategies to allow children to think and consider the big questions that the Religious Education curriculum brings by starting each unit with the big questions and building on this in subsequent lessons. The big questions are used around the school for children to reflect and share their understanding at different times during the day. We try hard to not see Religious Education as an isolated lesson, it is woven into different parts of the school day and through cross curricular links.
How does the RE curriculum embed the children’s understanding?
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Pupils progress should be measured in what they say and how their minds have been opened as learners. Our Religious Education curriculum is a large part of what we do as a school along with the relationships and health education element and our Christian ethos and vision. Our Religious Education curriculum opens lines of enquiry and enables the children to have deep discussions. Our children are making links to other faiths and through homework tasks these discussions are also taking place at home. As a school we are excited to learn about the lives of others and their beliefs. Assessment for learning is observed over the whole unit of work and is viewed as the richness of learning. Our aim is that the contribution that Religious Education can make will hopefully prepare our pupils for life in modern Britain today. |