Curriculum Overview: RE

Curriculum Intent:

At SSJS, we are committed to ensuring that our children are prepared for the world around them and receive the opportunity of experiencing many different cultures and world views. The teaching of RE provides pupils with a knowledge and understanding of many worldviews and further enables them to appreciate and respect the views, rituals and beliefs of those around them.

For RE, we follow “Jigsaw RE,” which is a comprehensive enquiry-based, teaching programme for Religious Education for primary school-aged children. Our belief is that by using this model well, children’s critical thinking skills can be developed, their motivation to learn increased, and their knowledge and understanding of, and empathy with people and their beliefs, religious or otherwise, will be enhanced. This approach takes very seriously the philosophy that children are free to make their own choices and decisions concerning religion and belief.

Jigsaw RE promotes an enquiry-based approach because it motivates in-depth exploration of RE content/subject knowledge to answer the big enquiry question inherent to each unit. Knowledge is no longer an end in itself; it is important as the means with which to explore potential answers to the big questions posed in each Discovery RE enquiry.

As part of this teaching programme, we follow four steps:

 Step 1: Engagement: the children’s own human experience is explored to act as a bridge from their world (which may or may not include religion) into the world of the religion being studied.

 Step 2: Investigation: over approximately 3 lessons the teacher will guide the children to explore and investigate appropriate subject knowledge relevant to that question of enquiry.

Step 3: Evaluation: An assessment activity enables each child to show their thinking and the depth of critical evaluation.

Step 4: Expression: This refers the children back to the starting point of their own experience and allows them to reflect on whether their findings have influenced their thinking.

Click here to see the progression Map for RE