Dear Parents/ Carers,
We hope you enjoyed talking with your children, about our big question:
Who is responsible for taking care of our planet Earth?
Today every child in all classrooms from Reception to Year 6 took part in our whole school philosophical enquiry based on the book
Dinosaurs and all that rubbish by Michael Foreman
Everyone had amazing ideas to share within our communities of enquiry; some of the children’s responses will be posted on the website, so please take the time to have a look with your child over the coming days.
We are very excited to inform you that this is just the beginning of our journey to Going for Gold; a Philosophy 4 Children project based on Socratic Thinking, run by SAPERE, to enable schools to promote philosophy, thinking and reasoning skills within their curriculum.
At Christ Church our aim is to encourage all children to think, creatively, critically, collaboratively and caringly, therefore enabling them to become life – long learners. Encouraging children to be curious about the world which surrounds them, asking questions about ‘big concepts’ and more importantly, not being afraid to try and answer those questions, within the community of enquiry, through reasoning, listening, building on each other’s ideas and thoughts and empowering the children to have the confidence to argue for or against different ideas and concepts.
Every year group has been allocated 60mins in their timetable each week for philosophical enquiries. These enquiries are facilitated by the teacher. The children sit in a circle so that they can speak to each other, this approach also enables the children to have eye -contact with each other. There are a few rules, which we call our school charter. This is displayed in all classrooms and they are the same rules from Reception to Year 6.
These shall be posted on our website too!
We are pleased to inform parents that last July we received the Bronze Award from SAPERE as a result of the schools commitment to this project and we are on our journey towards Silver, which we hope to achieve by the end of this academic year. However, in order to do this we may need your help. Don’t worry though, this just means talking to your child. Questions may be sent home for homework, or your child may just have a burning question which they really, really would like an answer for.
Please just keep talking and enjoy yourselves whilst doing so.
Please keep an eye on our website for parent invites to come into school to watch an enquiry in some of our classrooms.
If you would like more information about this project, then please just follow the link.
https://www.sapere.org.uk/
