Today as a school we celebrated British Values. During the course of the day every class moved around school to a different teacher and classroom to learn about a new value:

Mutual Respect

We discussed what respect is, how we can show respect and how it makes people feel. For our activity, we considered the role of respect in sports, particularly football, and created our own captain armbands to display respect for anything of our choosing. 

Democracy

On British Values day we spent a session exploring and celebrating the concept of Democracy. To begin we created a mind map together on the whiteboard to brain dump all our knowledge about democracy, this was used to inform our lesson and cover any misconceptions we may hold. It provided us with a brilliant discussion point about the United Kingdom’s government and who is in charge. Then, we were able to utilise our knowledge to discuss how democracy is present everywhere around us, and we were then able to use our individual liberty to decide if we wanted to create a campaign and manifesto to run as a school councillor or complete a board game debate in a group.

Rule of Law

In our lesson we learned about ‘The Rule of Law’. We discussed the process of making laws, the difference between civil and criminal law and who upholds the law. We imagined what the world would be like if there were no rules and people could do whatever they want. In our groups we thought of rules we followed in school, at home and in the community. We shared these ideas with the class. We then thought about a rule we would have in our own class if we were in charge of making the rules and presented this to our class for a vote. We then created posters to showcase the rules we would have in our classrooms if we had the opportunity.

Individual Liberty

First of all, Miss Carter presented us with a list of new school rules, unbeknown to us, these were made up and took away our individual liberty. This provided us with an excellent discussion point about what individual liberty truly meant to us. We then spent some time constructing a profile all about us. Then, we were able to use our individual liberty to choose the next activity we completed.