Missing Mel Resource Pack
Missing Mel is a moving and contemporary musical originally devised with young people from Youth Music Theatre UK in Belfast in 2004. It tells the story of a girl who goes missing at the start of the summer term and the effect of her disappearance on her friends and the wider school community. Where is she? What's happened? And did her arch-enemy Cat have anything to do with it?
In 2005 a work-in-progress performance took place at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The script was further developed and three performances of this version took place in 2006 at the Greenwood Theatre, London. These lesson plans use the script and DVD from these performances.
The musical includes a number of issues identified by young people as concerns in their lives. These include bullying, the harm done by gossip and rumour, issues around sexual attraction, and issues of stress, pressure and missing people which may lead to young people making desperate choices.
The Missing Mel Teachers’ Resource Pack contains 8 lesson plans designed for Personal and Social Development classes at level S3/S4, designed so that the second lesson will lead on from the first. Each lesson is assumed to be 50-55 minutes in length and the plans include 45 designated minutes of activity. This is to allow teachers to expand exercises, to allow some flexibility in the overall timings, and for time spent settling/moving into groups etc.
The lesson plans include playing clips from the attached DVD and looking at extracts from the script. They also include individual, pair, small group and whole-class exercises, discussions, writing tasks, optional drama-based activities
and other original work.
The overall aims of the Missing Mel Teachers’ Resource Pack are:
- To find engaging ways to involve young people in discussing issues that
affect their lives, - To raise the young people’s confidence and self-esteem,
- To help them understand how to make positive choices and
- To develop communication skills through stimulation by real and imaginary
contexts.
We anticipate that this resource will support the objectives of the Relationship, Sexual Health and Parenthood section of the Health and Wellbeing Outcomes within the Curriculum for Excellence.
The lesson plans and DVD footage can be found on the right-hand side arranged in their respective sections.
