I've got a golden ticket!

Here's a little soundtrack for this post :)

I've been teaching a winter intensive class on American culture in movies. We watched the original 1971 version of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" today. It was so much fun to watch my students watch the movie. It is sometimes easy to forget how much imagination and surprise there is in movies that you've grown up with. My students all agreed that the tunnel scene was pretty freaky ;)

One of the course requirements is that each student has to do a presentation on the movie. I had them look at the list of movies we were going to watch and rank their top five choices to do a presentation on, and then I put them into pairs based on their rankings. Two girls both wanted to do this movie, and they did an excellent job on their presentation.

They did a comparison of characters in the 1971 and 2005 versions of the movie and gave an overview of the plot with pictures for each key point. It must have taken them forever to make their powerpoint. At the end of their talking time, they said that they had a surprise for all of us. They pulled out a stack of chocolate bars that they had created labels for to make them Wonka Bars and handed them out to the class. Each person was supposed to open their chocolate bar, because someone would win the golden ticket!

When I opened mine, I was the lucky winner! I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, although there was a great deal of whispering and shuffling of the chocolate bars before they were handed out. The prize was some other snack food. I opened it up and passed it around the room and we all enjoyed the movie with our chocolate and snacks. All in all, a good time was had. I continue to be impressed by how my students handle presentations. They don't like them very much, but they tend to get far more creative with them than any presentations I ever saw in American schools.