Barnabas RE Day Themes

Barnabas RE Days offer a full day's programme to your school to explore Christianity creatively with primary-aged children through storytelling, drama, dance or music, according to the skills of the professional Barnabas team member.

Each day provides a flexible, enjoyable and educational experience, which will unpack stories and themes from the Bible alongside contemporary life illustrations. Follow-up material is also available for classroom extension work after the Barnabas RE Day.

Barnabas works with the following themes:

• Whose world?
• Who am I?
• Who is my neighbour?
• What's so special about the Bible?
• It's not fair!
• Advent and Christmas
• Lent and Easter
• Harvest

Whose world?

Workshops explore the order and beauty of our world as a sacred gift and open up questions about developing a shared responsibility towards our environment.
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Who am I?

Workshops explore issues relating to our identity as individuals, each person’s unique and special gifts and how those gifts might be creatively combined in successful teamwork.
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Who is my neighbour?

Workshops explore issues involved in caring for others, the nature of compassion and the building blocks that form creative communities.
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What's so special about the Bible?

Workshops explore the Bible as the Christian's sacred book, looking at what sort of book it is, the range and variety of its writings, in what ways Christians regard the Bible as true and how Christians use the Bible in their daily lives and their worship.
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It's not fair!

This is a theme to be explored with Key Stage 2 learners and has been developed in collaboration with the international charity World Vision. The workshops will use Bible stories that relate to issues of personal, social and global justice. It will include material that draws on the dramatic messages spoken by the Old Testament prophets as well as the stories of Jesus, which focus on how we should treat others and in particular those who are less fortunate than ourselves. The session will also include consideration of a real-life story related to the issue of fair trade, which will be supplied by World Vision and which will involve a child of primary-school age from the developing, majority world.
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Advent and Christmas

Workshops explore the events of the Bible that lead up to Christmas. Learners will be encouraged to use their imagination and step into these stories for themselves, so that they can experience the excitement and the dilemmas of people involved at the time, understand what they mean for Christians today and respond with what they themselves think about these stories.
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Lent and Easter

Workshops explore the stories of the Bible that relate to the period of Lent, Holy Week and Easter day. Learners will be encouraged to use their imagination and step into events for themselves, so that they can experience the excitement and the dilemmas of people involved at the time, understand what they mean for Christians today and respond with what they themselves think about these stories.
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Harvest

Workshops will explore Bible stories and themes that relate to Harvest. Learners will be encouraged to use their imagination and step into the stories for themselves, so that they can experience the excitement and the dilemmas of people at the time, understand what they mean for Christians today and respond with what they themselves think about these stories.
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Some of these themes also address many PSHE / Citizenship objectives, such as:

Whose world? - what kind of attitudes, actions and decisions improve or harm our environment? what is our responsibility towards our environment?

Who am I? - recognizing similarities and differences between people; feeling positive about yourself; recognizing your worth as an individual; recognizing and challenging stereotypes.

Who is my neighbour? - recognizing choices; realizing other people have needs; responsibility of care towards others ; issues of bullying and racism.
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