Interactive games and quizzes
This website has interactives quizzes and games on it - ideal for RS
Trying to enthral students all day long
I’ve just read this blog entry by Cindy Barnsley and I wanted to share it with you all. I think that as subject teachers we are so lucky because Religious Studies lends its self so beautifully to opportunities to make lessons both engaging and enthralling, but more importantly to enable students to think and reflect.
Global education
I found this blog entry which has lots of resources about adding a global dimension to our teaching - something that RS should be doing- well worth a look. I especially liked the “Global Village” sheet, which I have seen before, but lost my copy. There is also a really nice rich/poor 
sheet, which I think my year 10 short-course kids would like Take a look there is much more than this
How can our extra curricular club raise money for charity?
One of the things I intend to do in September is to start an extra curricular club for yr 7 and 8 students which will involves them raising money for 3 different causes. We are going to call the club “Action!” as it involve the students getting off their bottoms and doing something.
One thing we will be supporting is the work of two ex-colleagues, Rick Brown and Nancy Defreitas, who are working as volunteers in Argentina. They are working with a charity, Alimentar ensenando, which raises money to help disadvantaged people help themselves. More details can be found on this powerpoint presentation
Some of the money will also be sent to Chrisitan Aid - the students love the idea of buying specific things. Last year my year 7 class had a cake sale to help provide clean water.
We will also look nearer to home for our third cause. Something in the local community would be good.
So why am I posting this? Well, we need some ideas - things that can be done quite easily and which do not depend on the parents of the children always sponsoring them.
Let me know if you can think of anything.
The New Secondary Curriculum - Religious Education
These are the documents for the new proposed secondary curriculum.
http://www.qca.org.uk/qca_12228.aspx
http://www.qca.org.uk/qca_12229.aspx
Starter for Rawls, lessons on communities or rules
I found this starter activity on the Thinking 2.0 blog. I thought it would be ideal to use as an introduction to Rawl’s theory of justice, or for an introductory lesson on either communities or rules. In the past I have done the lesson where students write 10 rules for their new community, but I like the way this is much more focused.
http://taspd.edublogs.org/2007/07/15/lord-of-the-flies-starter/
CND - information pack and contact email address
Anna Liddell is the Peace Education Officer for CND. Her contact email is peaceeducation@cnduk.org
Anna is willing to come into schoolsto talk about the work of CND - I’ve booked her for one of our Sixth Form Conferences. She can also provide hard copies of the CND education pack - just email her and she will post you one off, or you can download one from the following link
CND - Peace Education http://www.cnduk.org/pages/ed/ped.html
CND campaigns non-violently to rid the world of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and to create genuine security for future generations.
The Moral Compass - Faces of Faith in America
Thanks to Chris for this link
This site outlines the stances of different religious perspectives on sex and marriage. What I quite like is that there are a range of Christian views which might be interesting to use instead of the usual Catholic and C of E (Catholic views are given, but not main stream Protestant views).
There are also a small number of videos to watch.
http://newsinitiative.org/story/2007/07/30/moral_compass
Another site for graphic organisers
This site has a range of organisers - some of them are more suitable for primary. There is also a booklet that can be downloaded whwich shows how the organisers could be used within a variety of subjects. http://www.edhelper.com/teachers/graphic_organizers.htm
Scratch
This site allows you to make presentations using Java (I think!). I haven’t tried to use it yet, but this link will take you to one one the Genesis story. http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/room209/587
Homepage: http://scratch.mit.edu/
technorati.com
Graphita Live Studio, a web based image editing tool
This site enables you to upload photos and add captions, shapes, doodles etc to them. I thought I might use it to help students show empathy - for example, look at the picture on my blog header - by adding thought bubbles students could write in what they believe the young buddhist monks were thinking as they worship. They could also use it to show different viewpoints at GCSE (eg: have a photo with 2 people. Below one of them write fundamentalist Christian and under the other liberal Christian. The students could then write in speech bubbles the viewpoints of each perspective on the topic being studied. http://www.graphita.com/ Good for starters or plenaries
