Religious Education
Across Elm Academy, we aim to develop children’s skills of enquiry, reasoned argument and reflection. We are a multi faith community and our curriculum reflects this. Our RE curriculum focuses on respect, understanding of diversity and social cohesion. By delivering a diverse curriculum across the school, we encourage deep thought and personal reflection on big questions; fostering an understanding of diversity and promoting respectful attitudes.
We believe that RE enables pupils to build their sense of identity and belonging, which helps them flourish within their communities and as citizens in a diverse society. Our curriculum teaches pupils to develop respect for others, including people with different faiths and beliefs and helps to challenge prejudice. We prompt pupils to consider their responsibilities to themselves and to others and to explore how they might contribute to their communities and to the wider society. Children learn the importance of contributing positively to social cohesion by learning about the importance of a multi-cultural community and the positive impact this makes.
Our children are taught about a range of religions and learn to respect and ask questions about different religions, traditions and cultures around the world. Across the school year, we aim to make R.E relevant by studying and celebrating real events within our community as well as key religious stories to engage the children in a meaningful way. We share this understanding through whole school assemblies or exploring real artefacts from a focused religion during lessons. Our curriculum is designed to consistently revisit a range of religions, giving pupils the opportunity to recap and build on prior knowledge.
Our pupils very much enjoyed celebrating Diwali across the school and learning more about the Festival of Light.
We aim to make our RE lessons as practical and interactive as possible, leading to high levels of engagement and therefore high success rate with pupils remembering important information. Here are some photos of Year 4 leaning about the Buddhist Wasek festival, making lanterns and Year 2 learning about the Jewish Harvest Festival; Sukkot.