
Religious Education
Smithdown School is made up of children who originate from many nationalities, cultures and faith groups. As a school we aim to celebrate this diversity and offer a welcoming and inclusive environment for all our pupils, including new arrivals and non-native English speakers. We believe that Religious Education (RE) provides an opportunity to celebrate and foster awareness of these differences within our school and the wider world. It is a subject that celebrates diversity.
RE explores big questions about life, in order to find out what people believe and what
difference this makes to how they live, so that pupils can make sense of religion and worldviews, and
reflect on their own ideas and ways of living.
Our Aims
- To help our children develop respect and sensitivity for all people
- To help our children understand faith and moral codes to guide them and develop informed opinions
- To help our children develop an understanding of modern multi-cultural Britain and how this is reflected in their lives and local community
- To help our children understand more about the importance of religion in today’s world.
Religious Education Chatter

It has been a busy day celebrating Eid

Eid leaflets to celebrate the festival
We made our own information leaflets to explain all about the festival / celebration of Eid.
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Eid Celebrations
Lovely to see all our children dressed up for Eid. Lots of families have been fasting through Ramadan and have had a lovely few days celebrating Eid.
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Learning about prayer
Today, the children acted out the story ‘Daniel and the Lion’s Den’
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Year 2 Nativity
Our Nativity Slideshow.
Thank you all for coming to watch. We loved performing for you.
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The concept of ‘Ahimsa’
In R.E. today, we learnt about the Hindu belief in AHIMSA – non-harm. We learnt about Ghandi and discussed what some of his quotes meant.
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Some completed mosque sketches
We think some of these mosque pictures are incredible!We drew them as part of our RE unit which includes learning about ‘Ummah’ as part of the Islam religion.
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RE: The importance of the mosque in Islam.
We’re now in the Islam section of our RE unit and we are learning all about the sense of community and how the mosque plays an important part in bringing the community together. We took the opportunity to utilise our artistic skills too.
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Timetables in RE
In RE we looked at the difference between a Christian’s daily timetable and our daily timetables. We discovered some similarities and some differences.
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We have been learning about Diwali and are manipulating salt dough into our own diya lamps. 




Diwali workshop!
Thank you to our wonderful visitors for speaking to us about Diwali. We loved our workshop.
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Diwali Celebrations
Year 4 had such a great morning at our Diwali workshop. We wore some traditional Hindu clothing, learned some traditional dance, and even got to paint and create our own diya lanterns.
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Diwali lanterns
We are having so much fun making our Diwali lanterns with rangoli patterns.

Diwali 
We have really enjoyed learning about the celebration of Diwali this week. We are very excited to see our lanterns lit for our Diwali lunch tomorrow
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Diwali Celebrations
Today, year 3 had a workshop based around Diwali. The children enjoyed learning about this celebration. They learned how it called ‘the festival of lights’ and created their own pieces of art that candle lights are placed in. We got to dress up and took part in a traditional Diwali dance.
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Diwali lanterns
Today we are designing our Diwali lanterns for next week. We have learnt the story of Rama and Sita and thought about why Diwali is celebrated in Hindu religion. We are trying to focus on using Rangoli patterns.

Diwali Celebrations
Year 6 had some special visitors today who helped us to learn about the Hindu festival of Diwali. We looked at traditional food, special dress and other forms of celebration which take place. Most of all, we loved the dressing up and the dancing!
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Year 4 Temple trip
Year 4 had a very exciting morning visiting a local temple. We asked lots of questions related to our Hinduism unit.
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Hinduism … What is Moksha?
we learned about reincarniation and how Muslims believe if you have good Moksha you will be reborn, if you don’t you will come back as an animal.
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Great work in RE year 2
Your art work was impressive in RE this week! Well done Year 2
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‘Good Guy Code For Living’
We have completed our ‘Good Guy Codes for Living / How to be a Good Guy’ in RE. We made suggestions on actions and behaviour we can display to make the world a better place.
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RE: Villains and Rules
Within our RE unit of ‘What Matters Most To Christians and Humanists’ we talked about villains – What villains do we know? What makes a villain a villain? We then looked at positive and negative behaviour and consequences in school, at home and in society. We followed this up by designing our own ‘Good Guy Codes for Living’ which we are still working on.
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We shared our special things with each other
As part of our new topic we shared special things from home. We explained why they are special and what they mean to us.
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Eid Mubarak!
Happy Eid to all our families celebrating! We had a lovely day and week celebrating with all our children and adults.
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Throwing and Catching
We have been practicing our throwing and catching skills in a group. We worked together to see how quickly we can move the beanbag around the circle.
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RE: Geometric Patterns
After learning about Mosques, we followed step by step instructions to create our own geometric Islamic patterns. Now they are designed, we are going to colour. How symmetrical can we make them? ?
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RE: Grace, Ummah and Ahimsa
As part of our unit (Grace, Ummah and Ahimsa), we learnt a little about Ghandi, and how he protested peacefully against wrongs and injustices. We then used some key words to present in his name.
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Reception RE
Reception had a wonderful morning listening to the story of Noah and the Ark

Mosques Around The World
As part of our RE unit, we are finding out about mosques around the world and presenting our findings in Google Slides.
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Year 3 and 4 had an amazing time watching a Christmas performance! We all had a good laugh and got involved.

Starting our new RE topic
We started our new Christianity topic by looking at Christian symbols and artefacts. Christians believe God has many titles so we thought about the different labels we have.
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Celebrating Diwali
We have been learning all about the festival of Diwali this week. We made Diwa decorations and cards for Diwali. We also found how Diwali is celebrated and how Diwali means Festival of Light.
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A happy Diwali from 3TS! We made beautiful lanterns to represent the festival of light.



Diwali Lanterns
As part of our Diwali celebrations, Year 6 made lanterns displaying the symbols of, not only Hinduism, but other religions of the world too.
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We discussed actions of people in The Good Samaritan story.
We really had interesting ideas about the responses of each of the characters in the story of The Good Samaritan and related situations to everyday life.


3TS explored the Puja in R.E.
3TS explored the Puja in R.E. then moved onto some tricky rolling in gymnastics. Well done! @SmithdownPrimY3 #smithdownpe #smithdownre
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First day back for me today and a lovely day spent with year 2
First day back for me today and a lovely day spent with @SmithdownPrimY2 counting and discussing precious items important to us @misshath2 #smithdownre
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Jewish creation story with each other this week
Year 2 have worked so hard to share the Jewish creation story with each other this week #smithdownre
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Eating apple dipped in honey…
On Friday we celebrated Rosh Hashanah by eating apple dipped in honey #smithdownre
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Today we explored an adult Bible and children’s Bible
Today we explored an adult Bible and children’s Bible. The Bible is the special Christian Holy Book #smithdownre
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