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:

Democracy

We started our session together by discussing what we already knew about democracy. We then watched a short video clip where the definition of democracy was shared with us as well as how it is used in this country. The video was very informative! As a class, we then talked about how we make changes in school before thinking about what changes we would like to see. The children were then split into groups and asked to write down one thing they would like to change about school in the middle of their piece of paper. They were then given the task the split their paper in half and write down all the reasons why the change should happen and all the reasons why it shouldn’t. For our final activity, the groups then held their own debate discussing the change. Half the group debated why the change shouldn’t be implemented with the other half discussing why the change shouldn’t occur. The whole group then had a vote at the end of the session to decide whether the change would be implemented.

Individual Liberty

We began our session by talking about what we know about individual liberty and the meaning of each word. We understood that individual means it’s about us and that we are all different and we also learnt that liberty means freedom. We made our own individual profile of what and whom is important to us and we drew pictures. 

Mutual Respect

Each group discussed what ‘respect’ meant to them. We then watched a short video where children and other members of a diverse community explained what ‘respect’ meant to them. Working in small groups, the children created posters about ‘mutual respect’ where they showed respect by working collaboratively, listening to each other, taking turns and valuing each other’s opinions. Each group presented their poster to the rest of the children. Our final activity was to sing and dance to a song about ‘Rights and Respect’.

Rule of Law

Today we looked at rules, laws and consequences in the UK. We talked about which rules and laws we knew about and the consequences of them.  We looked at criminal and civil laws, their meanings and the offences that happen in each of them. We also spoke about the rules and consequences that we have at home and in school.