Big Hairy Hamish – The Monster Who Cared (Scottish Opera)

ABOUT

Scottish Opera developed this project as a genuine interdisciplinary learning experience. The project began with preliminary CPD sessions designed to assist teachers with the delivery of the teaching pack and to ensure that ‘Big Hairy Hamish’ provided a context for exploring environmental issues. Teachers could elect to work as broadly and/or deeply with the topic as they chose, but its design ensured that even minimum involvement resulted in making links across the curriculum prior to the performance.

Draigton Primary p2 — The recycling journey begins

Accompanying the CPD was a teaching pack, vocal CD giude and full colour storybook. These were created to help young children build up familiarity with the characters and consequently good interaction with the four artists who delivered the eco-friendly tale of Big Hairy Hamish (the monster who cared).

The project involved:

– 960 primary school pupils
– c.35 teachers
– 32 separate performances
– 27 schools in Perth and Kinross
– c.35 teachers accessed CDP
– 4 professional artists from Scottish Opera

In addition to using vocal and instrumental music to tell the story and explore environmental issues, maths and English were integral to the project resulting in a rich learning experience for all the pupils.

PURPOSE

Scottish Opera developed the project to support the Scottish educational drive to develop stronger connections between literacy and learning for early years pupils. The format promotes active learning and enables participation, exploration and creativity via themes and issues specifically relevant to this young age group.

Through the project, Scottish Opera aimed to raise awareness of key issues in the story – Healthy Eating & Recycling. It also set out to examine aspects of social development such as making friends, not always going by appearances and the importance of active citizenship in the community. Children were provided with opportunities to discuss and debate the issues, learn the songs, develop healthy eating plans and create visual and aural responses to the characters in the storybook.

Scottish Opera developed Big Hairy Hamish by planning activity around some of the experiences and outcomes within Health and wellbeing at Early Stages and First Level including:

I can expect my learning environment to support me to:

– develop my self-awareness, self-worth and respect for others
– understand and develop my physical, mental, spiritual well being and social skills
– learn about where to find help and resources to inform choices
– acknowledge diversity and understand that it is everyone’s responsibility to challenge discrimination
– understand how what they eat, how active they are and how decisions they make about their behaviour & relationships affect my physical & mental wellbeing.

IMPACTS

Schools used the experience of participating in Big Hairy Hamish as the context for exploring healthy eating and re-cycling over extended periods post performance. Because the children are very young evidence of the impacts is best described through pictures.