As this week was Interfaith Week, we started to look at our topic of Buddhism. First of all, we discussed the religion of Christianity. This is the one that we learn about most of the time. It is good to learn about all of the different religions. We realised there were 6 main religions and the one we were going to focus on had a symbol of the wheel. This wheel was known as the circle of life. We coloured our very own wheel in and identified the different stages of life – birth, live, death and reborn (we even used the word reincarnation to describe this).
We thought it was really important to understand where Buddhism started. We told the story of Sidharrtha, a prince who went on a search for enlightenment after seeing the four sights of sickness, aging, death and how happy a poor man was. He eventually became enlightened so became a Buddha (this is a teacher to us). He wanted to share his enlightenment with others. We reordered this story in groups and retold it so we were familiar.
Furthermore, we recapped all of the information we had learnt so far and put this information into our very own poster. We added to this information through our very own research. We used the tablets to scan a QR code which took us to a very helpful website. We were able to find out that Buddhism was the fourth biggest religion, it had been around for 2500, they didn’t believe there was a God and it started in India. We are really excited to continue to learn more this year.
One child explained, “Another word for reborn is reincarnated.” Another said, “The wheel of life goes like this. You are born, you live, you die and then they believe you are reborn as something else.”
