Thiebaud Cake Sculptures

For my 5th graders last project I wanted to do something fun and out of the box with them. We studied Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud. We watched a CBS interview with Thiebaud from a few years ago- the interview told about his progression as an arstist and of course talked about his artwork.

For our last trimester I did almost all 3D projects with the 5th grade, and they wanted to continue with the 3D theme. So instead of drawing desserts, we made cake sculptures. I saved any type of food box for a few months. The students first built their cake assembling the recycled boxes and food containers. Next they paper mached the form with newspaper to make it one solid piece. Then they "frosted" their cakes using colored construction paper and paper mache again. After they were done with the paper macheing we discussed decorating. I asked how many of the students had ever seen shows like Ace of Cakes or Cake Boss, several had. I found a slide show on YouTube of amazing cakes and showed them that. And it turns out that this year we have a wonderful cake designer working right in our school. One of our instructional paras runs a small cake business on the side and she makes AMAZING cakes. She was nice enough to bring in her portfolio of cakes she has created to share with my classes. They were quite amazed. After viewing all the different cakes, I put tons of random supply out for them to use to decorate. We started to run out of time with it being the end of the school year. But for a big end of the year project they turned out pretty unique!