Sorting through old school resources, I found this project from 1997. I was in my second year of teaching and still have memories of making this booklet as a media mini-project for Year Seven.

The scan of the booklet shows the way in which it was constructed back in the last century: printing sections out on one of the school’s computers and then pasting it all together before photocopying the whole thing and stapling it together manually.

I can’t recall why I chose Star Wars as the topic. I taught it before the Prequels (possibly before I’d even heard they were in production). I have a vague memory about wanting to teach epic narrative structure – but I may have made that up since. There are attainment targets drawn from the original National Curriculum and quite broad assessment objectives:

It only got taught once. The students hated Star Wars. I hadn’t appreciated that for them it was an old fashioned film that their dads liked. They also intuitively understood that this was a pop culture that didn’t deserve the same respect as Shakespeare (or even the first Harry Potter which had just been released a few months earlier). The project was a failure and I still distinctly remember one frustrated little girl telling me over and over that she just “didn’t get it” and me getting frustrated and telling her over and over that it was a very simple story. It was a useful lesson learned by me.