This website accompanies two hours of broadcast resources for RE for 11-14 year olds about Christianity, and two hours of programmes for RE for 14-16s.

These notes provide some well sorted classroom curriculum activities that bring out the learning for pupils. The ideas are supposed to be challenging, suggestive and provocative, not to give a complete teaching programme. While the programmes deal chiefly with Christianity, there are also some items from several different religions to compare. There is lots of material for 11-16s to use for challenging learning, whether they are religious themselves or not.

Challenges

There are three kinds of challenge in the programmes:

· The challenges that Christianity and other religions present to learners in school
· The challenges to religious ideas that come from other points of view
· The ways in which learning about religion in RE can be rigourously challenging for pupils of all abilities

Over the years, national RE broadcasting from the BBC has moved from factual learning programmes about Christianity and other religions through 'clippable' usage of archive material towards a range of drama and documentary formats, on a national or a global field. Now something fresh: 2 hours of programming on Christianity and Jesus in RE for 11-14s which we hope teachers will use in small segments to add verve to their lessons. 2 hours on challenging beliefs for 14-16s with a similar, huge variety of formats.

Eclectic formats

The programming is an eclectic collection of short items. They range from 1 -15 minutes in length. They all aim for a provocative feel, using a wide range of formats such as cartoon, video game, mini documentary, drama, talking heads, personal story, 60 second sermons, debates and so on.

Key features

These programmes are the product of careful planning and thinking about broadcasting and RE. The key features of Curriculum Bites include:

· A very wide diversity of formats.

· Brief and stimulating provocation from the screen, for the classroom (rather than a whole lesson spent 'watching the telly')

· Small amounts of religious content, with sharp attention to the ways teachers can use them and the classroom activities that are suggested by them (with practical support, through these notes and task sheets, provided for easy use).

· A willingness to use quirky, flippant or eccentric material and juxtapositions alongside profound issues aiming to both tease and challenge the viewer.

· Close connections with the most widely used schemes of work for 11-14s (e.g. the English Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's RE schemes of work, Scottish RME 5-14 guidelines, commonalities from Agreed Syllabuses and Faith school programs).

· Also connecting with the 14-16 programmes of study in syllabuses, GCSEs and Standard Grade specifications.

· Intentions to stimulate classroom activity on a 'try it for yourselves' basis: lots of the formats can be set up by the teacher for the class to try for themselves (e.g. Selling Jesus, Parables in the Kingdom of the Tramps, 60 Second Sermons, Brave New World, The Big Question, Moral Minefield).

· There is some material that draws upon Buddhism, Judaism or Islam in the programming, and much that refers to Christianity. But we have placed the learning potential for this series firmly: this is all about questions and answers around religious and spiritual topics.

Practical notes for using the programmes

This web site provides teachers with classroom materials to turn a video clip into a learning experience. Sometimes this means we have written worksheets which can be copied and used with a class. In other cases we have provided ideas for teachers to use in active classroom sessions of discussion, debate, role play or creative activity. There are at least three ideas for the use of each programme strand.