Religious Education
The Lime Religious Education Curriculum aims to develop knowledge and understanding of religion, providing learners with the ability to think critically and reflect personally. As a Trust, Discovery RE is used to deliver Religious Education lessons of the highest quality, providing a range of planning and assessment materials to support the delivery and enhance the skills of the learners.
The belief of Discovery RE is that, using an enquiry-based 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. RE does not try to persuade but rather to inform and develop the skills with which evaluation can take place.
Discovery RE advocates an enquiry model with a 4-step approach as the basis for implementation. Every unit (enquiry) is based around a key question. The key question for the enquiry is such that it demands an answer that weighs up ‘evidence’ (subject knowledge) and reaches a conclusion based on this. This necessitates children using their subject knowledge and applying it to the enquiry question, rather than this knowledge being an end in itself. Discovery RE focuses on critical thinking skills, on personal reflection into the child’s own thoughts and feelings, on growing subject knowledge and nurturing spiritual development.
There are 64 Enquiry modules covering Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism support the teacher to deliver engaging and challenging RE lessons with confidence.
Christianity is taught in every year group, with Christmas and Easter given fresh treatment each year, developing children’s learning in a progressive way.
Assessment is a major contributor in evidencing the impact and this needs to be tracked to ensure that pupils are building on their skills and knowledge over time. It can then show progression and also uniformity between parallel classes ensuring that in-school gaps or anomalies are dealt with. Retrieval is a vital component of the curriculum sequencing. Prior learning is drawn upon, wherever the content is taught.
The Lime Religious Education Curriculum, enhanced by Discovery RE, ensures specific and associated subject vocabulary is planned sequentially and cumulatively from throughout each year group. High frequency, multiple meaning words (Tier 2) are explicitly taught alongside and help make sense of subject specific words (Tier 3).
The learning modules for each year group are enhanced and supported by detailed Knowledge Organisers, providing core knowledge and vocabulary.