Our St Joseph’s Mini RDT stands for the Mini Religious Development Team. At St Joseph’s, we have a Staff Religious Development team made up of Miss Milivojevic, Mrs Ward and Miss Waite but we are also lucky enough to have a Mini RDT made up of some of our pupils across the school. These children have a very important job to do in school. They work hard to continue to develop the catholic life of our school and to work with staff and pupils to ensure that there is progression and coverage across school and that we are constantly working hard to continue to strive for the very best!

Our Mini RDT have already started with weekly actions to further develop the catholic life of our school. The Mini RDT met with Miss Milivojevic and Miss Waite at the beginning of September to discuss what their actions would be for this half term.To begin with the Mini RDT evaluated what we already do well at school:

  • Children delivering collective worship – ‘we enjoy this’ ‘It helps us to understand the readings and prayers’ ‘We make the reflection and prayers purposeful to our own intentions’.
  • Fun RE lessons – ‘Our RE lessons are fun and we learn a lot.’ We enjoy using the Bibles, role play, art, English and using the i-pads and computers in our RE lessons.
  • The hymns and songs that we sing are fun and we sing really well.
  • We have lots of different prayers that we say and we use Makaton to sign some of these.
  • Our school has a lot of religious quotes around it that reminds us of God’s word.
  • We have a lot of religious statues around school.
  • We have a great prayer garden on the field.
  • We listen to God’s word and my friends remember some of the messages in the parables when they include people who might feel left out at playtime or when they say sorry for being mean.

One member of our Mini RDT came up with a brand new initiative that we all agreed was a great idea. He wanted every class to have a Disciple of the Week box where peers could nominate other peers to be a “Disciple of the Week”. This directly links to the Gospel Values and our School Mission Statement. We encourage our children to behave the way Jesus taught us to, to treat others the way we’d like to be treated and our Mini RDT member thought this would be a fantastic way to acknowledge this each week. Each week in Golden Book, we share our class Disciples of the Week with our whole school community which includes our pupils, teachers and families.

The pictures below show the initial proposal of the idea for Disciple of the Week and the second picture shows the Mini RDT come together to evidence their action has been put in place and all classes now have their Disciple of the Week boxes.

Prayer Garden Assembly

The Mini RDT also decided to further increase the profile of the Prayer Garden across all aspects of school: worship, lessons and the children’s free time: break and lunchtime. The team got together over two weeks to prepare an assembly for the rest of the school to explain and share ways we can use the Prayer Garden. They explored this through the use of ICT – a slideshow and pictures, role play and drama and songs.

These pictures were shared with our school in the assembly. The first pictures show ways we shouldn’t use the prayer garden and the second pictures demonstrate and model ways that show respect to our Prayer Garden and to God – the ways we would want to see our children using the Prayer Garden.

The Mini RDT used role play during the assembly as well as the above images shared on a PowerPoint. The whole school was involved in deciding whether the scenarios were things we should do in the Prayer Garden and things we shouldn’t do in the Prayer Garden. In the same day, children from all ages were seen to be using the Prayer Garden even more so than usual and also showing reverence and respect at all times. This assembly had impact straight away! A great job!