RS Teacher in an Outstanding comprehensive school in London. All my lessons are always conceptual, accurate in content, challenging and engaging for students. The department is consistently among the best results in the school with strong P8 and attainment scores. I would greatly appreciate any feedback on resources, good or bad, I'm always looking to improve, please review!
RS Teacher in an Outstanding comprehensive school in London. All my lessons are always conceptual, accurate in content, challenging and engaging for students. The department is consistently among the best results in the school with strong P8 and attainment scores. I would greatly appreciate any feedback on resources, good or bad, I'm always looking to improve, please review!
This is a fairly packed lesson trying to cover all the ground on these topics.
It starts with getting an understanding of sin and its real problem, then goes on to look at the need for a saviour before finally identifying Jesus as that saviour in Christian thought.
There are a couple highly informative videos (the you tube channel has lots more good ones I highly recommend it) if they don’t work reload the power point and give it time to load.
Punctuated within are a number of questions as well as a detailed info sheet that could be used for multiple activities.
This is actually quite a convoluted topic, what you realise very quickly is that Christians have lots of different ideas about heaven and hell because the Bible is actually rather vague on exactly what happens.
The best part of the lesson is the activity where they have to rate how ‘good’ the various famous people are. I printed those slides out and got students to hold them. They then stand in a line and move along it based on the relative ‘goodness’ of the other celebrities. The crunch bit of the learning comes when you get to the last one - God. Ask the class if it looks right that God is right next to (normally MLK) because that suggests God is only a little better, it requires the rest of the names to shuffle down to get further away from God. In my classroom they end up lining up against the side of the class opposite God. It shows really clearly that from God’s perspective, humans are all sinful and evil and no matter how much good they’ve done, they are not worthy to get to heaven. My year 10s got a lot out of this activity.
I’ve tried to steer the lesson simple but I have a theology degree so if you’re not confident in certain bits, just cut it or simplify it.
The diagram maybe useful if you want to teach it to that depth. I would say that it is important to mention that a Christian isn’t just someone who goes to church or even identifies as one, it is someone who truly believes that Jesus has died for their sins, not simply that non-Christians go to hell but they go because they are not forgiven. Also worth mentioning that many Christians these days are unsure if God really does send people to eternal punishment, maybe they still get to go to heaven - we don’t know.
Lesson 7: Sin, Salvation and Atonement
Lesson 8: Heaven and Hell
Lesson 9: Problem of evil
Please see individual lessons (uploaded separately) for more detail on each one.
Please note, there is also a lessons 1-9 bundle available.
This is a really big lesson for worship and prayer, you may find it easy to split in two. It covers the who the whats of these different styles. I’ve also now updated it to include lots of videos through, which the students really like. My year 10s like to write EVERYTHING down, its good training for A level and will help the revise, however you may want to just turn them into crib sheets if you want the to note take.
The activity is a sorting one but in the interests of time I recommend using highlighters, the hands are also included, it is a way of listing advantages and disadvantages - thinking along the lines of 12 mark question.
In the powerpoint I’ve included a video that has stuff to do with speaking in tongues (its a long video but you’d start from about 11 min in. Obviously, skip this if you’re not confident in explaining this belief and don’t want to open a can of worms, most people find it a bit freaky. If you do include it, I recommend talking them through the video and explaining that these people are having a ‘religious experience’ and it’s their emotions on display.
If the videos don’t load after a few moments, re launch the power point.
This is probably better taught over two lessons. Here we have slides for communion and baptism.
The activity around communion can be adapted, it’s essentially a comparison activity.
Another simple lesson on festivals, I actually had mine do a research homework leading in to this. I recommend combining this lesson with another shorter one.
This lesson covers the work of three charities including street pastors, Trussell trust abd the oasis project (Carousel activity) It also includes some really helpful videos on street pastors and Trussell trust.
This lesson looks at the way Christians evangelise today. There is a video on Alpha, and the one on John Chau which appeared in the news - really useful for discussion.
I got students to do a for and against for evangelism they cam up with loads of ideas.
This lesson looks at the growth (or decline) of the church in the UK as well as the rapid growth of the church across the rest of the world. It goes into detail on CFAN, using a video from their website. The video shows people falling over in the Holy Spirit so please be aware and do make a teaching point out of the beliefs in the video.
Lesson 1 - Worship and Prayer
Lesson 2 - Holy Communion & Baptism
Lesson 3 - Pilgrimage
Please see individual lessons (uploaded separately) for more detail on each one.
Lesson 4 - Festivals (Christmas and Easter)
Lesson 5 - Role of the Church in the Community
Lesson 6 - The place of mission and evangelism
Lesson 7 - Growth of the worldwide Church
Please see individual lessons (uploaded separately) for more detail on each one.
This is a longer lesson on Islam, it serves as an introductory outlining the history and cultural setting before moving on to look at Sunni and Shi’a Islam. There are a few embedded videos to make things more interesting and the final activity can be adapted to make it more creative or dynamic (carousel) as the info sheet is included.
This lesson covers the nature of God in Islam, it looks at the nature of God as ‘one’ , and explores why there are no images of God. There are a number of questions and activities included in the power point.
This lesson looks at the 99 names of God, as well as exploring the ideas of God’s immanence and transcendence. There’s a number of activities to choose between, I used the debate one as a table debate and had them circulating and writing on the table with the whiteboard pens!
This fascinating topic not for the feint hearted can be a joy to teach, but it really requires you to have your head around it. Hopefully this powerpoint will help!
There is a paradox right at the centre and that is the point - the ultimate response is to say God is entirely other and we can’t know.
For Muslims, two ways of understanding can be seen,
Emphasising Allah’s immanence - Allah knows you so well he knows what you will do.
Emphasising Allah’s transcendence - Allah is outside time and space so knows the future as we know the past.
AQA GCSE RE RS - Islam Beliefs lessons 1 - 4
For more information on each lesson, please see individual lesson pages.
Lesson 1: Sunni Shi’a Split
Lesson 2: Tawhid - oneness of God
Lesson 3: Nature of God and Supremacy of God’s will
Lesson 4: Predestination.
This a revision matrix I’ve created to help my students pick up more marks on the influence questions. A number of them were failing to distinguish the influence from the belief hopefully this helps. It can also be used in class.
I’ve set this up so it can be done as a carousel type activity. Included is a scaffolded worksheet for note taking. There are are questions in the powerpoint and a 12 mark question at the end.
It looks at the roles of angels including Mika’il and Jibril. It follows the AQA textbook.