RE

From September 2023, we have adopted the Opening Worlds humanities curriculum for History, Geography and RE.

Opening Worlds curriculum and its associated teaching approaches will secure the highest possible quality of education for pupils. This is because the curriculum ensures that the subjects reflect the wide reference and academic practices, outside of school, to which they refer. In addition, the material is organised so that pupils use earlier material to access to later material and so that pupils start to see how everything connects within a subject.

Opening Worlds has strongly recommended that the material is taught in sequence because each part makes the next part much more understandable. Numerous words that are explicitly taught and practised in Year 3 are then taken for granted in lessons in Year 4-6. If children do not have the secure knowledge of the content and vocabulary of the Year 3 curriculum this is likely to slow progress and limit enjoyment.

All key stage 2 children have, therefore, started with the Year 3 Opening Worlds curriculum. As a result of moving from the school’s previous curriculum to Opening Worlds, the school has identified a small number of content gaps. These have been noted and will be addressed through our choice of books that are used in English and read to children.

Our curriculum rationale and intent

At Oldmixon Primary School, we use a framework called Discovery RE from Nursery to year 2, which is an enquiry based approach to Religious Education. As a school, we cover Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism to deliver challenging and engaging RE lessons. Christianity is taught in every year group with Christmas and Easter given fresh treatment each year, developing children's learning in a progressive way. Each RE topic has a theme, an over arching key question and a specific focus on a religion. The RE enquiry begins with an engagement lesson, followed by a series of investigation lessons before moving onto an evaluation lesson. Finally, the children engage in an expression lesson where they are encouraged to express what they have learned in a creative way.

In addition to this, we also have themed mornings where we celebrate various religious festivals such as Diwali and Chinese New Year. These often include a round robin of activities within key stages.

In KS2, as part of our Opening World curriculum, our coherent and well-sequenced curriculum ensures that material is organised so that children use earlier material to access later material so that children see connections within and between subjects. The curriculum is ambitiously broad in scope, meticulous in rigour, highly coherent and carefully sequenced so that children are able to understand new content, arrive with curiosity and recognise a wide range of technical vocabulary. Through powerful storytelling, explicit vocabulary teaching and retrieval, children will learn about and learn from the different kinds of questions human beings can ask about religious origins, beliefs and practices, namely questions that derive from philosophy, theology, social sciences and history.