At Birchington CE Primary School, the class teacher will teach an RE lesson every week using the Understanding Christianity resource. The topics taught in each year group can be found on the yearly overview.
Pupils and their families can expect a high-quality religious education through a curriculum that is challenging, rich and varied. As a Church of England School, our distinctly Christian Vision and School Values of Hope, Peace, Forgiveness, Love and Respect are at the heart of everything we do.
Our teaching of Religious Education provides opportunities for pupils to further explore how this Christian Vision and our Christian Values relate to our everyday lives. It is our intent that RE in our school will raise the religious literacy of all pupils by:
➢ Enabling pupils to know about and understand Christianity as a global living faith that influences the lives of people worldwide, and as the religion that has most shaped British culture and heritage
➢ Encouraging pupils to explore key religious questions, reflect critically upon their learning and develop the skills to analyse, interpret and apply Biblical text
➢ Enabling pupils to have a respect for, and understanding about, other major world religions and world views, their impact on society, culture and the wider world, enabling pupils to express ideas and insights
➢ Contributing to the development of pupils’ own personal, spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, exploring and enriching their own beliefs and values
➢ Encouraging pupils to become courageous advocates and champion causes which are special and meaningful to them, be it local or global issue
Substantive and Disciplinary Knowledge
Substantive Knowledge
The substantive knowledge in RE is the subject specific Religious Education content. This is everything we want the pupils to know and do in RE. RE includes knowledge about religious and non-religious traditions. This can include knowledge of:
· The different ways that people express religion and non-religion in their lives
· The artefacts and texts that are associated with different religions
· Concepts that relate to religious and non-religious traditions, such as ‘dharma’, ‘incarnation’, ‘prayer’, ‘sacred’
Disciplinary Knowledge
The disciplinary knowledge in RE is the tools that we use to study religion and the methods we use to gather knowledge.
Disciplinary Knowledge in RE involves the connections, theories, similarities and differences that the children can apply to their thinking when discussing religions and world views and the impact these have on people’s lives.
Personal Knowledge
In RE there is also a third type of knowledge called ‘personal knowledge’. This is where the pupils build up and become aware of their own presuppositions, experiences and values about the religious traditions they learn about.
Working Walls
Every classroom has its own RE Working Wall. The Working Walls evolve over the term and provide meaningful support for the children. The RE Working Walls are interactive and will include pupil responses/questions/ideas. They will often display key vocabulary and the learning questions (LQs) that have been explored in RE lessons. Here are some examples of our RE Working Walls across the school.