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Religious festivals
Religious Festivals Rolling Programme
As a school, we are very focused on ensuring that children have access to not only high-quality teaching in Religion and Worldviews, but access to a wide and diverse range of activities to support their understanding of shared practises and ideas within a worldview and for them to develop their own personal reflectivity.
We have developed at Old Cleeve a Religious Festivals Rolling Programme, which runs alongside our Christian festivals. The Religious Festivals programme gives children the opportunity to explore how other people celebrate their faith and their culture. Pupils are given drop-down afternoons, where we come together as a school and celebrate, with a focus on completing celebratory tasks that are known to each festival. Children have participated in festivals such as Diwali, Holi, Guru Nanak’s Birthday, Hajj, Tu’ BShevat, Vesak Day and Chinese New Year.
Theology
Though we want our children to have fun and engaging activities, at the heart of the programme is an exploration of multi-disciplinary lenses which includes Theology and Sociology. Before we introduced the programme, children found it difficult to contemplate that other religions/faiths and cultures might not celebrate Christmas and Easter, which often led to the question ‘Well what do they do during Christmas?’ In response, by creating the programme, it gives pupils an understanding of how other religions celebrate with festivals at the same time, depending on religious calendars e.g. Hannukah and Diwali near Christmas.
Every year group is given the opportunity to explore why the festival is significant to a religion or community. This also exposes children to a range of different theological worldviews from an early age, even though that worldview might not be explored fully in their set curriculum. For example, Reception and Year 1 still explore Hindu Dharma and Sikhism as part of the programme, but it is not in their long-term plan. However, this allows for pupils to consistently build on their understanding and have a progression of knowledge.
Sociology
For part of the programme, we discuss with children how their can be different viewpoints within a religion on how a festival is celebrated. Pupils are aware that we celebrate the festival in our own way, so we might have a cultural bias, but others might participate in other activities. In response to this, we try to incorporate a variety of activities, so that pupils can understand from a variety of cultural viewpoints.
Publications
As a school, we are delighted that our Religious Festivals Rolling programme has been recognised and celebrated in different publications. This includes the Somerset SACRE newsletter and the national REToday Magazine.
Links to these publications can be found below: