Religious Education

Religious Education Intent
At St Faith’s, RE aims to support every child to take part in the development of tomorrow’s rapidly changing world by beginning their journey to religious literacy. We encourage children to think creatively, to be engaged, inspired and challenged. The subject encourages children to become autonomous and creative problem solvers, both as individuals and as part of a team. Children are provided with the opportunity to explore and experiment with a variety of materials and tools, confidently applying them to their work as they design, make and evaluate a range of products for a purpose.

Implementation of Religious Education

We aim to encourage our children to remember knowledge and build on their prior learning by ensuring we carefully consider how knowledge is sequenced. Teachers must understand what pupils must know and be able to do in each subject by the end of each academic year; they must recognise what has come before and what pupils will continue to learn in the next year.

Our curriculum design is based on three main principles:
1) Learning is most effective when spaced rather than blocked.
2) Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention. ‘Interleaving is a process where students mix, or interleave, multiple subjects or topics while they study in order to improve their learning.’
3) Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.

Some of our content is subject specific, whilst other content is combined in a cross-curricular approach.

Early Years

In the EYFS, the ways in which every child engages with other people and their environment – playing and exploring, active learning, and creating and thinking critically – underpin learning and development across all areas and support the child to remain an effective and motivated learner.

Children are taught RE through the following areas of learning:

In Communication and language, children:

• respond creatively, imaginatively and meaningfully to memorable experiences;
• use a religious celebration as a stimulus and talk about the special events associated with it;
• learn about important religious celebrations through artefacts, stories, music, etc.

In Personal, social and emotional development (PSED), children:

• use some stories from religious traditions as a stimulus to reflect on their own experiences and explore them;
• use role play as a stimulus and talk about some of the ways that people show love and concern for others and why this is important;
• think about issues of right and wrong and how humans help one another;
• demonstrate a developing awareness of their own needs, views and feelings and be sensitive to the needs, views and feelings of others;
• show a developing respect for their own cultures and beliefs and those of other people;
• show an understanding of what is right, wrong and why.

In Literacy, children:

• listen with enjoyment and respond to stories, songs, music, rhymes and poems and make up some of their own;
• extend their vocabulary, exploring the meaning and sounds of new words.

In Understanding the world, children:

• begin to learn and become aware of their own cultures, beliefs and those of other people;
• ask questions about religion and culture as they encounter them in everyday experiences;
• visit places of worship, learn new words associated with these places and show respect towards them;
• talk about similarities and differences between themselves and others, among families, communities and traditions.

In Expressive arts and design, children:

• explore and play with a wide range of media and materials and have opportunities and encouragement to share their thoughts, ideas and feelings through a variety of activities;
• use religious artefacts as a stimulus to enable them to think about and express meanings associated with the artefact.

Key Stage 1

In accordance with the Lincolnshire Agreed Syllabus, children are taught the following key areas:

• God: What do people believe about God?
• Being human: How does faith and belief affect the way people live their lives?
• Community, worship and celebration: How do people express their religion and beliefs?
• Life journey: rites of passage: How do people mark important events in life?

In Key Stage 1, RE is taught half termly throughout the year, so that children can achieve depth in their learning. Teachers have identified the key knowledge and skills of each topic and consideration has been given to ensure progression across topics throughout each year group across the school.

At the beginning of each topic, children are able to convey what they know already as well as what they would like to know or find out. This ensures that lessons are relevant and take account of children’s different starting points. Consideration is given to how greater depth will be taught, learnt and demonstrated within each lesson, as well as how learners will be supported in line with the school’s commitment to inclusion.
Cross curricular outcomes in RE are specifically planned for, with strong links between English, Art, Music and PSHE identified, planned for and utilised. The local community is fully utilised, as appropriate, to achieve the desired outcomes, with extensive opportunities for learning outside the classroom embedded in practice, including strong links with our school church.

The distinctive Christian values of respect, compassion, trust, justice, friendship and community are promoted through the experiences we offer to every child, in all areas of the curriculum.