The Ewoks

Sku, meechu sheeu ta Jordyn. Hi there, I know this was a bit of a strange way to start the post and you probably have absolutely no idea what it means, but that is ok because I will teach you. What it means is “Hello, my name is Jordyn” in a language called Ewokese. You can probably guess by looking at my title that this post will be about Star Wars, about the little Ewok creatures from the movie. This whole project we did was actually themed around Star Wars which was a little bit difficult since I had never seen one movie, ever! Anyway, back onto the subject of the Ewoks. For those of you who don’t know what the Ewoks are, they are teddy bear like creatures who live on the Forest Moon of Endor, but don’t be fooled by their cute, fuzzy appearance, they are pretty vicious.

My Inquiry Question

The very first thing we had to do before anything else was to think of a bunch of questions about Star Wars, specifically inquiry and open ended ones.This took quite a bit of thinking and reading through the “Big Book of Star Wars” to come up with a few questions I liked. Once we had a few, we had to keep narrowing it down until it was the one you liked the most and were the most interested in doing research on. So I had my list, and I narrowed it down to this question, “How does the Ewok language and habitat impact their everyday life? How can I teach people Ewokese?” I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, Ewokese, it is the scientific name for the language that the Ewoks speak, I didn’t make it up! We also had to do lots of research to get the information we needed. To help me with that I watch videoes and also went on lots of websites. Down below will be a draft of a few of my questions as well as some research notes.

My Model

The next thing we had to do was actually answer the question we asked in the first place. We did this by creating a project with two components, a physical model of something, and something that shows your information and what you have learned. For my physical model I built a forest that depicts the moon of Endor. I t was really fun to build even though it took a lot of time. Anyways the model was made of real branches that I had to constantly mist with water so they didn’t die. I left a little space for my iPad in the center where my information component would be.

My Book

So for the information part I actually created a book in an app called book creator. The contents of the book included to categories. A few pictures of the habitat, as well as a dictionary I created to help me teach the language. The language is very hard to translate since it is made up, but I found an amazing website that already had a lot of words, but if I just put those words straight into my book it would kind of be cheating. So what I did was I listened to a bunch of recordings and videoes from the movie and found matches of a bunch of words that I already knew. Then I put the words in and added voice recordings and a bunch of other fancy things. If you would like to read my book click here.

Debugging

Once everyone’s projects were finished, it was time to debug and write our speech. Just before I get any further into the post I would like to let you know that this whole project was put in an exhibition along with everyone else in my class. Back to my debugging process, I continued to add a few more words to my dictionary as well as editing a few photos for my book. I also added a Star Wars sign to my model to make it more obvious that it was about Star Wars. Now for my speech, at first I wrote a full speech with all the words and punctuations. But then I realized that I couldn’t really use that because it would be too difficult to read the whole thing, so I shortened it to point form so I could look at it whenever I needed to.

Room Decoration

After this process, it was time to decorate the room. We decided to decorate it as the Hoth rebel base since we were on the Light Side. There was also a Dark Side, we split into two groups. We split the room into three, outside of Hoth, and two parts of the rebel base. Hoth was really fun to decorate. We put blue paper over the lights so it looked like it was cold, it added a really cool effect. We hung sheets from the ceiling to separate each room, and set the tables up all around the room. A big hit was the Admiral Sn-ack bar, we had lightsaber pretzels, planet cookies, obi wan kabobies, Luke skywater, and Jedi Juice. If you would like to see a quick set up video go to my friend Izzy’s blog. Here are a few pictures:

 

At the exhibition, when the rooms were all put together it looked amazing with all of the cool lights and all of the projects set up. I had a bowl of Edible Ewoks (teddy grahams) at my table, which were very popular. I had quite a lot of people come to my stand which was a little bit scary at first but I eventually got used to it. Oh! I forgot to tell you about my costume. I dresses up as an ewok and it was the best costume ever, it was like a fluffy suit with a fluffy hood. I think I learned a lot about scripts and speeches because half way through I realized I didn’t even need my Q card to help me, after a bunch of times saying the sam thing I pretty much had a set script in my head.

The whole point of this project was to answer my question, “How does the Ewok language and habitat impact their everyday life? How can I teach Ewokese?” Well, the language they speak impacts them for both the good and the bad. It is good because when their enemies are there know one can understand them and make any plans since their language is different from any other creature, but because of this, the bad part is when they want to talk to somebody, they can’t. The wait heir habitat impacts them is for the good. Because they are high up in the trees their enemies and predators can’t get them, and they live in the forest so that gives them all of the resources you need. I think this project has taught me a whole lot about Star Wars, but not just that, it has taught me how to manage my time carefully, create my best work, and to always improve. Take critique and then improve. I think it is just fitting that I say good bye and thank you in Ewokese, Teha and Yeha!

~Jordyn😁