The teaching of Religious Education at Laurel Avenue Community Primary, is designed to aid teachers to help pupils build a Religious Education schema within their long-term memories. Rather than memorising isolated facts, building a strong Religious Education schema enables pupils to organise knowledge in a meaningful way.
As a school we map
• Breadth of study - the topics the pupils will study
• Threshold concepts - the big ideas in Religious Education that pupils will explore through every topic (understand beliefs and teachings, understand practices and lifestyles, understand how beliefs).
• Milestones - the goals that pupils should reach to show they are meeting the expectations of the curriculum.
Milestones are the goals that pupils are aiming for; through developing a strong schema based on knowledge, vocabulary and tasks pupils progress through the milestones.
Pupils with SEND are given full access to the Religious Education curriculum. Teachers use a range of strategies to enable all pupils to become successful in Religious Education including:
• Discrete teaching of vocabulary to ensure all pupils access and use religious terminology
• Pre-teaching where appropriate for example: sharing texts with a pupil prior to the lesson
• Dual coding to help pupils efficiently learn key concepts
• Thinking maps and mind mapping to enable pupils to organise and memorise key knowledge.