Intent
At St Leonard’s, R.E teaching will be enjoyable and encourage a love of learning. It will start with the child’s own perspective, creating space within learning in which the child’s knowledge, ideas, attitudes, values, beliefs and spirituality are recognised and articulated. We will develop the child’s use of language, enabling them to learn to think critically and express their ideas, values, beliefs and spirituality. Through our R.E teaching we will build knowledge and understanding of the beliefs and practices of Christianity and the other principal world faiths, encounter the insights and understandings of other religious traditions and secular world views. The children will be given the opportunity to focus and reflect critically on a range of visions, wisdom and truth claims belonging to the world’s religious traditions and secular world views. The children will understand that R.E. isn’t exclusive, they will explore right and wrong, morality and ethics, within religion and human experience. They will develop their own creativity and spirituality, and an appreciation of creativity and spirituality of others, as well as their own perspectives, conclusions and responses to the issues raised by religion and human experience.
We aim to help children understand that questions in RE are in the main contentious, and that worthwhile questions in RE will seldom simply be answered by facts. In RE we aim to develop a classroom where inquiry is the norm – children are encouraged to look for alternative possibilities and to be open-minded and flexible in their thinking. We aim to teach children to think for themselves, become reflective learners and draw their own conclusions.
Our R.E teaching will include a focus on the skills of: Investigation, Interpretation, Analysis, Evaluation, Synthesis and application.