The children were carrying on with their research today and I felt more able to let them spend them longer on it today as for part of it they had our notebus laptops to do research on the internet which I knew would keep them more focused. This did work and they remained pretty engrossed until very near lunchtime. (It might have helped that we had been swimming first thing as I think this tires them out!)
Added to this I had one group at a time come out to my laptop and add a post into their class blog. I tried to get them to write not only about what they had been finding out but also about how well they were working together. They needed help on this and we will have to work on them assessing their own work and being reflective. They have been really excited to see the number of hits they have had go up and to have had comments from other people.
One group have been really struggling to work together, even with the help of my support assistant today, so I spent some time with them and suggested that they add another country onto their topic. This worked – it had them fired up about finding out about a new country. The newsround website is really well presented for children with, as would be expected, great information for kids on it in ‘kidspeak’.
Some other groups have worked really well, particularly ones where I was not sure about the grouping.
I thought I had explained really well at the beginning of the rich task why we were doing this, wanted we wanted to learn etc and we had done all of the usual brainstorming. Then today one of my bright ones asked “why are we doing this anyways, I don’t get it!” Typical! This is the same child though who asked when we were having an impromptu discussion on religion if Jesus had been alive during World War 1! One positive point from this was that she had obviously realised he wasn’t going to have been alive during World War 2 since I might have mentioned that during our topic!
That same religious discussion involved me getting asked questions such as “How did Jesus die twice to get up to heaven” and questions about the Holy Trinity all being as one. I was a bit stumped!
You should post the RE questions online on the blog – I know lots of RE teachers and students that would be interested in discussing the questions!
To answer your first question, Jesus didn’t die twice to get to heaven. Christians believe that because Jesus died on the cross without any sin, he defeated death. So when he ascended into heaven, he didn’t die to get there, he went through choice as his work on earth was done. It was then time for his disciples, with the help of the Holy Spirit to spread the good news about his work and teachings.