Religious festivals
08-05-2025
To culminate our learning on religious festivals, we thought about reflective questions and used all our learning to answer with our own opinion. We were respectful and 3TS gave some fabulous mature responses.
7Religious 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.
Smithdown Primary School follows the Liverpool Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education. The syllabus aims to allow pupils to explore themes and concepts within religion drawing on beliefs from a range of different faiths and world views. The Liverpool SACRE has produced a syllabus which is intended to be fully inclusive. The aim of Religious Education is not to make believers out of pupils but to educate and inform; the syllabus is designed in a way to be reflective and inclusive.
Structure of the Liverpool Agreed Syllabus:
The agreed syllabus sets out what pupils should study in Religious Education.
Foundation Stage – Although not statutory RE can be used to contribute towards the Early Learning Goals
Key Stages 1 and 2 – The syllabus follows the same format as the National Curriculum programmes of study with sections on knowledge, skills and understanding and breadth of study.
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.
Parental right to withdraw their child from Religious Education (RE)
The right to withdraw your child from RE was first granted in 1944 when RE was called ‘Religious Instruction’ and carried with it connotations of induction into the Christian faith. However RE is very different now and is very open and broad; exploring a range of religions and non-religious worldviews.
Our RE curriculum is a subject that celebrates diversity and gives children an understanding of the similarities and differences between faiths. We do not teach any religion as true or untrue. We firmly believe that it is your absolute right to bring your child up following your religious tradition but this religious nurture happens at home, not in RE lessons. In our RE lessons, pupils are finding out about what different people believe and how they practise their religion. In their future lives, our pupils will need to work and live alongside people from a range of religious backgrounds so it is essential that they know enough about other religions to do this respectfully and successfully. We want our children to understand that they can hold their personal beliefs whilst being respectful of others who may hold different views. We believe that our RE curriculum supports our one school rule of showing Kindness and Respect.
Parents can only withdraw their children from RE – no other curriculum areas. For example, pupils cannot be withdrawn from a study of religious art in and art lesson.
If, after reading the above documentation (Whole school overview), you are still considering withdrawing your child from RE on the grounds that you will provide your own RE education, then we ask that parents arrange a meeting with a member of the senior leadership team to discuss your wishes.
A copy of our policy on the right to withdraw your child from RE is available on request.
Religious Education Chatter
It has been a busy day celebrating Eid 🥳 we have drawn henna hands, made party hats, played games and enjoyed dancing together.
03-04-2025
Eid leaflets to celebrate the festival
02-04-2025
We made our own information leaflets to explain all about the festival / celebration of Eid.
Eid Celebrations
01-04-2025
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
31-01-2025
Today, the children acted out the story ‘Daniel and the Lion’s Den’
Year 2 Nativity
17-12-2024
Our Nativity Slideshow.
Thank you all for coming to watch. We loved performing for you.
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The concept of ‘Ahimsa’
05-12-2024
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.
B-tales shared the story of
Some completed mosque sketches
28-11-2024
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.
RE: The importance of the mosque in Islam.
14-11-2024
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.
Timetables in RE
12-11-2024
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. 🪔
24-10-2024
Diwali workshop!
22-10-2024
Thank you to our wonderful visitors for speaking to us about Diwali. We loved our workshop.
Diwali Celebrations
22-10-2024
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.
Diwali lanterns
22-10-2024
We are having so much fun making our Diwali lanterns with rangoli patterns.
Diwali 🌟
22-10-2024
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
Diwali Celebrations
21-10-2024
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
21-10-2024
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
21-10-2024
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!
Year 4 Temple trip
15-10-2024
Year 4 had a very exciting morning visiting a local temple. We asked lots of questions related to our Hinduism unit.
Hinduism … What is Moksha?
14-10-2024
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
12-10-2024
Your art work was impressive in RE this week! Well done Year 2
‘Good Guy Code For Living’
10-10-2024
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.
RE: Villains and Rules
10-10-2024
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.
We shared our special things with each other
12-09-2024
As part of our new topic we shared special things from home. We explained why they are special and what they mean to us.
Eid Mubarak!
25-06-2024
Happy Eid to all our families celebrating! We had a lovely day and week celebrating with all our children and adults.
Throwing and Catching
27-02-2024
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.
RE: Geometric Patterns
29-01-2024
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? ?
RE: Grace, Ummah and Ahimsa
25-01-2024
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.
Reception RE
23-01-2024
Reception had a wonderful morning listening to the story of Noah and the Ark
Mosques Around The World
18-01-2024
As part of our RE unit, we are finding out about mosques around the world and presenting our findings in Google Slides.
Year 3 and 4 had an amazing time watching a Christmas performance! We all had a good laugh and got involved.
11-12-2023
Starting our new RE topic
15-11-2023
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.
Celebrating Diwali
15-11-2023
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.
13-11-2023
Diwali Lanterns
13-11-2023
As part of our Diwali celebrations, Year 6 made lanterns displaying the symbols of, not only Hinduism, but other religions of the world too.
We discussed actions of people in The Good Samaritan story.
09-11-2023
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.
19-10-2023
3TS explored the Puja in R.E. then moved onto some tricky rolling in gymnastics. Well done! @SmithdownPrimY3 #smithdownpe #smithdownre
First day back for me today and a lovely day spent with year 2
19-10-2023
First day back for me today and a lovely day spent with @SmithdownPrimY2 counting and discussing precious items important to us @misshath2 #smithdownre
Jewish creation story with each other this week
19-10-2023
Year 2 have worked so hard to share the Jewish creation story with each other this week #smithdownre
Eating apple dipped in honey…
19-10-2023
On Friday we celebrated Rosh Hashanah by eating apple dipped in honey #smithdownre
Today we explored an adult Bible and children’s Bible
19-10-2023
Today we explored an adult Bible and children’s Bible. The Bible is the special Christian Holy Book #smithdownre
