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Leighton Library, Dunblane

Scotland's oldest purpose-built independent library founded in 1687

New learning resource for use in primary 5-7 to support exploring the poem “To a Haggis” by Robert Burns

Added at 15:15 on 28 January 2025

The Leighton Library, on the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns on 25 January 1759, released a new learning resource for use in primary 5-7 to support exploring the poem “To a Haggis” by Robert Burns, as it appeared in the 1787 Edinburgh First Edition of "Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect" by Robert Burns, who visited Dunblane that same year. The Leighton Library has this Edinburgh First Edition. The famous address "To a Haggis" appears in the Edinburgh First Edition but didn't appear in the Kilmarnock edition of the previous year.

This learning resource contains images of each of the three pages containing the address "To a Haggis" by Robert Burns from the Leighton Library's 1787 Edinburgh First Edition. These are presented side-by-side with text in a more easily read format.

There is an activity about the common practice of using a "long s" in place of the letter s we would recognise today (and helps the learner understand why texts printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century are harder to read for us today).

There is a wordsearch, a jumbled words activity, a crossword puzzle, and a fill-in-the-blanks activity, all using words from the address "To a Haggis", and each with with an associated colouring activity.

There is an English translation of the poem to aid learners who may be unfamiliar with the Scots words and phrases used by Robert Burns.

There is a guide to creating a poem of your own, in the style of "To a Haggis", about a food you like to eat, with suggestions for what to include and how to build it with the same rhythm of syllables and rhyming pattern.

Click on the link below to download the learning resource about the address "To a Haggis" from the 1787 Edinburgh First Edition of "Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect" by Robert Burns. This resource was created by Leighton Library Volunteer Guide Malcolm Wilson.
https://www.leightonlibrary.org.uk/robert-burns

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