R.E Curriculum overview
At Our Lady’s Catholic Primary School we are passionate about the subject of R.E. and its importance of helping the children respect, understand and acknowledge a wide spectrum of beliefs. R.E is delivered through the Come and See and RED R.E scheme, it runs from EYFS to Year 6 and has 13 units that follow the Catholic Calendar closely. The teaching of R.E involves 3 strands: ‘learning about’ (AT1: Knowledge and Understanding), ‘learning from’ (AT2 Engagement and Response) and ‘express’ (AT3 Analysis and Evaluation). Explicit R.E takes place during timetabled lessons (10% of curriculum time) supported by assemblies, liturgies and community worship. This means 2 hours of R.E per week in KS1 and 2.5 hours of RE per week in KS2. Through our R.E. curriculum we aim to encourage the natural curiosity of the child, encourage respect for the Catholic faith and through this other faiths and provide opportunities for questioning and expressing their argument alongside a critical evaluation of evidence.
Through this scheme we facilitate the pupils in finding out about belief systems. This will be done by giving the children a variety of well targeted quality activities that inspire and capture the child's imagination and visualise the religious story or scenario. These could include:
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Extensive art and drama activities
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Scenario based approaches e.g. imagine if, what if?
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Matching scripture to a song, music, poem or story
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Using plenty of talk and use of talk partners
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Probing and open-ended questioning
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Opportunities for pupils to devise their own questions
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Clear links between stimuli and the learning intentions
We aspire to ensure the children are continually shown how their religious and theological experiences relate to the changing world around them and debate current topics regularly. To do this we give opportunities to present well thought out arguments to justify their point of view, in a respectful and tolerant way, using examples from religious sources to demonstrate that they know what Jesus and his followers were like, what he did and what he thought in different circumstances. Express activities can be given meaning when the pupils are given a particular role such as journalist, editor, illustrator, advisor etc.