Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to this lesson on Examination Practise for the Christian beliefs unit.

I am sure this is the lesson that you've been looking forward to the most because we all love practising for exams. I am Miss Kendrick, if you've been going through other lessons in this unit, then you will know me quite well by now.

If this is the first lesson that you are looking at from this unit, it should still be useful for you in terms of practising applying your knowledge of Christianity to examination questions.

What I would recommend is that before you do this lesson that you've spent some time revising.

So the previous lesson in this unit has some revision questions, just so that when you start answering these questions, you have a starting point.

I'm not going to be explaining well, some new knowledge in this lesson, I'm mostly going to be looking at how we apply knowledge we already have to examination questions.

So if you don't feel ready in terms of your subject knowledge, always spend some time revising first.

But if you feel like you do ready and you do feel ready and you're super confident, this is what we're going to be doing.

So we're going to start with some quick fire questions which will fit well with short answer questions that you may get from some exam boards.

We are going to look at some explained questions and then an evaluation question as well.

The thing to be aware of as we begin is we are going to try and make sure that this is going to represent as many exam boards as possible.

It's probably going to fit best with AQA and edexcel, but it's still going to be useful for other exam boards because we are practising those skills.

So those skills of explaining a belief, those skills of evaluating a belief.

The thing that you will need to do is make sure you talk to your teacher about what the exam board you are on expects of you in an exam.

Because the structure might be slightly different to what you see in this lesson.

But like I said, it's all about practising writing out answers.

So I hope you have a pen and some paper and a different coloured pen to make additions and corrections to your work.

We are going to have to have the attitude that we are willing to write in this lesson because like I said, that's what you need to practise doing when it comes to examinations.

And if you get these skills pinned down now then you're going to be absolutely flying when it comes to end of unit assessments, or your actual GCSE exams. So we are going to start with some low value questions.

So all exam board specifications have what they call low value questions.

So this means they'll be worth one or two marks.

So in AQA they have one mark questions and two mark questions.

Eduqas and WJEC have to mark questions, Edexcel and OCR have three mark questions.

And even though these questions aren't necessarily worth very many marks, they're going to be really, really useful, especially if you're borderline on grade boundaries, they can be the difference between you getting a grade five, or a grade six, for example.

Also, lots of the knowledge that they test you on is going to be knowledge that's going to be really important for your longer answers such as questions about key words and definitions.

If you get asked a key word, or a definition in your low value questions, and you don't know it, chances are later on if the same key word comes up, in your examination, you're going to struggle to answer that.

So that is why these are really important.

So we're going to begin by doing some quick fire questions, because like I said, this is going to look quite different and lots of different exam boards.

So for example AQA, or you should get us a definition and you'll have four options that are given to you and you will need to select the correct answer.

So what you need to do with these quickfire questions is, ideally, I would love it if you tell me the answer, you talk to your screen, you might feel a bit silly, but who cares you're learning.

If you cannot get over the sense of silliness, you can either say doubts in your head or even better point to it on the screen as well because that shows that you're really engaging.

Please do not just watch me asking you questions and then pausing and waiting for an answer, because that's going to be awkward for both of us.

So we'll begin.

Firstly, what is the Holy Spirit traditionally represented as in Christian art? Okay, the answer is a dove and you're often also see it represented with fire as well, which leads to the story of Pentecost.

Which of the explanations below is the best description of God in traditional Christianity? I'm going to give you a bit of time to read those answers.

Okay, there is one God in three persons.

So that links to the key word, the Trinity, which is a key Christian belief about God.

What was miraculous about Jesus's birth in the Gospel story? We've got two answers here, actually.

I should have said that before.

There we go.

So Mary was a virgin, and it was predicted by a prophet.

So if you are hovering between those two answers, well done.

What is the name of the event in which the angel Gabriel told Mary she would become pregnant? The Annunciation.

So the word Annunciation is a bit like the word announce.

So the idea that Gabriel announced to Mary that she was going to have a baby.

Where was Jesus born according to the Gospels? In Bethlehem.

Who did a host of angels announce the news of Jesus's birth to? To the shepherds.

Which word means to take on flesh and shows the Christian belief that Jesus is God in human form? And the word is incarnation.

And I've got the word reincarnation on there on purpose, because that is a word that students often get muddled up with incarnation.

So for Christianity, we're focusing on incarnation.

True or false? Christians traditionally believe The Son came into existence in the nativity story The answer is false.

So remember Christians believe that Jesus is a member of the Trinity, and therefore they believe he is fully God or equally God.

God is eternal.

And so they believe that the person of Jesus is eternal as well.

They just believe that he was incarnated in the Nativity story, so that's when he became human, but they believe that he existed beforehand.

Okay, so now I've got two, two? I've got one question for you, which would be worth two marks on some exam boards.

So you're being asked to give two of the 10 commandments.

So just spend one minute on this.

You don't need to write long four sentences, two short sentences will do Pause the video now and write down your answer.

Okay, so let's see how you got on.

Please make sure you have another coloured pen ready for corrections.

Why do we do this? We do this so you can see what you knew at the beginning of this lesson and then you've got your corrections there ready to make sure you can learn them.

So when you look back over your work, anything written in a different colour, you might think, "Oh, actually, that's what I need to revise." Because everything else you already knew.

So that is one reason why we mark and add our corrections in a different colour.

So two of the 10 commandments.

You could have do not murder, you could have honour your parents.

There are several other things you could have as well, such as keep the Sabbath day holy, do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not be jealous, don't make idols, do not worship other gods.

I'm not counting but that sounds like most of them.

Maybe you were accounting.

Hopefully, we've got all 10 there.

Next question, another question which requires you to give two things.

So it says give two things that happened in the story of the resurrection.

Again, you could write two short sentences for this answer.

So pause your video now and complete the task.

Okay, and here's a couple of answers for you.

So Mary thought Jesus was the gardener and the stone was rolled away from the entrance of the tomb.

Again, you could have other answers here.

You could have that the disciples came and found the tomb empty, you could have that angels were there and said, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" You can talk about Jesus appearing to His disciples for 40 days after the resurrection or that Jesus was resurrected on the third day, which is Easter Sunday.

There's a whole list of things you could have.

So the thing to keep in mind for questions like this, is sometimes there's a lot of options and that is a really useful thing to know.

So what we're going to do now is we are going to look at explain questions.

Now these ones are going to be slightly different for each exam board.

And you need to ask your teacher which exam board you're on so that you know the best way to approach these questions.

The questions I'm going to give you and the question above fits best with AQA and Edexcel.

And for Eduqas and WJEC, you might be expected to write longer answers.

The style of the question might look a bit different for OCR.

But what's going to unite all of these is that you're going to be tested on your knowledge of these Christian beliefs.

And you're going to be tested on your ability to explain them.

So in terms of the details of how you structure your answer, I encourage you to talk to your teacher, hopefully you already know what they're expecting of you.

And I'm going to give you an module answer that's going to give you an idea of what sorts of things you should be including.

So two Christian beliefs about the afterlife.

What you're going to do is you're going to start by doing a mind map or bullet pointing a list of things that you can just remember about the afterlife.

We are not working under timed conditions at the moment.

So we've got time to have a good think, before we decide how to write out answer.

And what often happens with students is they start to write their answer straight away, and they stop and get stuck because they haven't actually decided what they're going to include.

Doing a mind map or a bullet pointed at least first just helps us to get down what we know on paper.

And then you can look at it and think, oh actually, I can explain the most about these two points.

So that's what we're doing now.

So in a moment, you're going to pause the video, write down some knowledge that you have about Christian beliefs about the afterlife.

Okay, hopefully you've got lots of things down and I've got some ideas here for you as well.

Just in case, you're struggling to remember some things.

So, we have got the belief from many Christians that the afterlife starts on the day of judgement.

That is something where there is variety of belief because, like we've said before, some Christians will believe in a personal day of judgement or the idea that someone goes straight to heaven when they die.

But some Christians will believe that everyone's afterlife begins on a future day of judgement.

And we've got that Christians have different interpretations of Bible verses about the afterlife I have just expressed that.

I was talking about the beliefs of the day of judgement.

We've got the idea of heaven as an eternal reward, purgatory as a process of purification, and hell as a place of punishment.

What I haven't included is all of those different interpretations about heaven and hell.

So I hope that you've got some of those down.

What I'm talking about here is, do Christians believe that heaven is a physical place or do they believe it's a spiritual place? Or do all Christians believe in hell? Or do some believe that all people go to heaven? Because look, God is omnibenevolent, which means all loving.

So we've got loads and loads of ideas there.

What we're going to do next is you're going to pause the video again, and you're going to try and explain two of these beliefs.

So remember, you need two points with a specific detail in from Christianity.

Let's try not to be vague or wishy washy.

And then you're going to explain that point which could be adding a bit more information, it could be linking it to something Christians do because of that belief, or even talking about teaching in the Bible as well.

So pause the video now and write your answer.

Well done for writing your answer.

What we're going to do now is we're going to look at what you've written, and you're going to use my model answer as a bit of a guide to see whether you've included everything you need.

So you might have chosen some different points to talk about.

To me, that's absolutely fine.

But what I want you to look at is the colour code that I've got in my model answer.

So I've got points in purple and my explanation in green.

And the reason why I've done this is just to show you the difference between making a point and developing it with an explanation.

because this is an explained question, so you need to make sure that you're going beyond just making a point.

What you'll be able to do, well hopefully once I've gone through the answer here is to look at your own piece of work and see if you can identify two clear points and two clear explanations of both points.

So I'm going to read through my answer for you.

One belief about the afterlife is that some Christians believe that all humans will go to heaven.

This is because they believe that God is omnibenevolent, which means all loving.

So wouldn't eternally punish people.

Notice that I've used the phrase some Christians because we need to make sure we show that we understand there's a variety of belief in Christianity.

Another belief about the afterlife is that God punished some people with hell or punishes some people with hell.

This is because they believe it would be unjust if people's bad actions weren't punished.

So, there we've got a couple of different beliefs going on, well, beliefs about heaven and hell.

I want you to pause the video and see if you can add to your own answer anything that you're missing, and see whether you've got some good explanations for your points.

Well done, I hope you've added some things to your answers.

So the next thing we're going to do is looking at how we explain with evidence.

Some questions will specifically ask you to include evidence.

And that might be a quotation, or it might be a story from the Bible.

And this is one reason why we talk about memorising quotations sometimes.

And the next lesson in this unit is going to be an opportunity to practise recalling those quotations from memory, because we want to use them for evidence in our answers.

We have to remember that when we're talking about Christian beliefs, they're not just plucked out of thin air, but that they have their origins usually in the Bible.

So knowing some of the Bible and those quotations is going to be really, really helpful.

So the question here is, explain two Christian beliefs about the Trinity.

So again, explained questions need to be in full sentences, you need to make the point and explain it.

And this question is actually fairly open.

You could talk about the different members of the Trinity, you could talk about Jesus, you could talk about their roles and things like that.

I think it's always good to put in a definition of the word Trinity or any key word that's in a question to show that you understand it and that you know what you're on about.

What you're going to do now is you're going to pause the video, you're going to write down as much as you can remember about the Trinity.

So we're going to do the same as what we did before.

We're just going to get our brains going, see what we can remember, and then you'll write your answer.

Okay, so here are some beliefs from Christianity about the Trinity.

We've got the belief that all three persons of the Trinity took part in creating the world.

We've got our definition of Trinity, which is the box nearest to me up here.

The Trinity is the traditional Christian belief that there are three persons in one God.

We've got God the Father is the creator, God the son is the Saviour, and God the Holy Spirit is a guide.

So we've got specific roles of each member of the Trinity.

And we've got the idea that all three persons of the Trinity are eternal because of the belief that they are all equally God.

So what you're going to do is you're going to pause the video, add any of these ideas to your bullet point or to your own mind map and then, again we're going to have an opportunity to pause and see if you can write an answer.

Well done for writing your answer.

I wonder how you got on with that question or whether you found it a bit trickier than the last one.

And if you did, it's really understandable for two reasons.

Number one, the Trinity is a really tricky concept in Christianity.

It's difficult.

So it's going to be hard to explain.

Another reason is because I did not give you any evidence for you to use in your explanations.

And this was so that you could see how important it is that you already know those quotations to things in your head.

And that is why I'm going to encourage you to take part in the next lesson, in which you will practise learning some of those key quotations and stories.

So I'm going to go through my example with you.

Now, this is half of my answer, and I've got my other half on the next slide.

And again, I've got a key.

So I've got my point and my explanation, just like I did last time, but this time, I've got my evidence in pink to show it to you.

Now, I've talked about the Trinity in terms of creation, and in my next half of the answer, I've talked about Jesus.

But just to be clear, you could take a simpler approach.

You could say, one belief about the Trinity is that they have Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The role of the Father is the creator.

And then you could get some evidence from the creation story.

And you could say the role of the Holy Spirit is the guide.

And you could explain some evidence for that as well.

So just to be clear, my answers are not the only answers.

So hopefully, that's an encouraging thing that I'm telling you.

So that you know that hopefully, you've gotten some good things down.

So let's get to my example.

One Christian belief about the Trinity is that all three took part in creating the world or all three persons of the Trinity took part in creating the world.

For example, in the creation story, God says, "And now we will make human beings, "they will be like us and resemble us." Many Christians believe that the use of the word our or us supports the belief that they're three persons in one God.

So if you want to get down my model answer or add to your own answer, especially, you might want to add the quotation if it's relevant to what you've got so far, pause the video now to do that.

Okay, let's look at the second part of my answer.

Another Christian belief about the Trinity is that Jesus is God incarnate.

See nice key word in there incarnate, which means we've got to take on flesh.

For example, in the Bible, it says, "For God loved the world so much "that He gave His only Son, "so that whoever believes in Him may not die, "but have eternal life." Christians would say that Jesus is God incarnate in human form, and that he came to save humans from sin.

So in this answer, I am talking about a person of the Trinity in a little bit more detail, and that's why it's relevant.

Always helpful to use the key word of the question in your answer.

So I've repeated the phrasing of the question in my point.

Again, I will let you pause the video so you can add it to your own answers.

All right, so we're going to move on to the next thing and this is going to be evaluate questions.

And this is something that we often find a bit more challenging and that is one reason why it's worth the most marks in your examinations.

So these questions need you to explain reasons for and against the statement.

So it's not asking you a question, it's giving you a statement, and you need to discuss it.

In this case, the statement we're looking at is, Jesus's teachings are more important of the crucifixion.

So think about who might say that and what their reasons might be for having that point of view.

So you will need to use what you've learned about Christianity.

Please do not guess or make things up.

The examiner always knows.

You will need a conclusion which you need to use to show which side of the argument you think is most convincing and why.

So that's going to be a judgement , not just a summary of what you've written.

And for a question in a Christianity unit, it's best to use Christian teachings only.

Like I often say, in a themes unit, you can refer to other religions.

But if you're just answering questions in the Christianity unit, only refer to Christianity, because that's what you're being tested on.

So what you're going to do now is, again, I'm going to give you a little bit of time to pause and write down some ideas for this question.

Write out the statement, put at point or mind map some ideas, and then I'm going to show you some thoughts that I've had in terms of how you might answer this question.

Well done for writing down some ideas, and I hope you added lots of my ideas to your answers, to your list as well, and that you're feeling very ready to answer this question.

A couple of things to keep in mind before we get going.

Firstly is evidence.

So what I would say is if you're not sure about quotations or whether or not they're relevant, just get them written down, so they're there and you're not struggling to remember them.

And then have a think about whether you can use them to answer the question.

If they're not relevant, don't use them.

One of my old teachers used to say, "Be a quotation placer, not a quotation plunker." What that means is, don't just throw in quotations randomly cause you feel like it will get you marks because actually, if the meaning of the quotation doesn't match what you're trying to say, it will just make it look like you don't understand the quotation.

So make sure the quotations are relevant and well placed, not randomly plunked into your answer.

Make sure you're evaluating as you go along.

So use sentences like, this is a strong or weak point because.

And you might argue, well, some of these fit better with Christianity than others.

And finally, you need a clear judgement in your conclusion.

What side of the argument do you think is strongest? So now you've got these tips in mind and hopefully a bit of a plan forming on your paper.

I'm going to give you a bit of time to write your answer.

I would often say to students to spend a good 10, 15 minutes, probably nearer 15 on this answer.

So don't rush it, pause me for as long as you need and then when you're ready to see a model answer, then play the video again so you can see what or not you've done some similar things to what I do in my model.

I hope you found that model answer helpful.

Just so you know, if you haven't done it, you do need to add your own answer based on these models.

Don't just read it and think, "Oh, that's different to mine." And then move on.

The way we learn is we compare them, you think about what you could add.

You don't have to copy from my model, but it might be that reading my model answer made you think, "Oh, actually, I could add something different "to my own answer.

' That's why you're using your different coloured pen to add in lots of notes.

So if I was to look at your work right now, what I would want to see is your black or blue pen where you originally wrote your answers.

And then I'd want to see loads of ink from a different coloured pen where you've added in lots of different things.

We're not doing this to be neat, we're doing this to add to our knowledge and add to our answers.

So if you haven't done that, please do go back in the video and have another look at those model answers.

That's one of the luxuries of learning remotely, that you can just rewind and listen to what I said again, rather than me just say it over and over again.

What a joy for you.

Thank you so much for taking part in this lesson.

I hope that you found it helpful.

And what I want you to do next is to complete that end of lesson quiz that will talk a little bit about exam practise.

And like I've said several times, do speak to your teacher about what exam board you're on and what they recommend for you in terms of writing structure.