3 Cheers for Cupcakes

Grade 1:  Inspiration; Wayne Thibaud

Wayne Thibaud

This was one of the lessons I did at this school for an art blitz in preparation for their annual Arts Show.  I was new to the kids, but cupcakes were not.

“Who likes cupcakes?”  Most of the students put up their hands, so I went on to showing them some of Wayne Thibaud’s paintings of – you guessed it.  Then they were raring to go, to ‘build’ their own.  Paper and paint, smocks required.  So, here’s what you do:

1.  Give each student a base strip to build their cupcake on.  Then, give each student their choice of 1/2 page of coloured construction paper.  I drew the shape needed on the board, and then had them cut that out of their choice of coloured construction paper for the cupcake base.

2.  Time for paint!  Working in pairs, they told me their choices of 3 colours they’d like to decorate their cupcake bases (just like those fun paper liners you can get).  No water, just a medium brush or two.  Stripes, dots, wiggly lines:  make it fun!  To keep things moving, I dried the results with my hair dryer while they started on the next part.

3.  I had pages preprepared with dots of paint, then ripped into strips.  Give each student 3 strips for them to rip into different lengths to build the triangle shape of the frosted cupcake top.  Get them to start with the longest, and rip successively smaller strips as they go.  Now it was time to build the cupcake on the base strip that is attached to the decorated cupcake liner.  Starting with the longest; they glued the remaining strips in order of length, slightly overlapping each other.  They were amazed as their cupcakes ’emerged’.

4.  Finally, I had them finish by gluing on my preprepared red circles (and stems) for (of course) the cherry on top.  Ta da!!  (I think they were pleased with it all).  The only thing better would have been to have actual cupcakes to eat.    Yum.

Guess I like ’em too.

Spring 2014 / Prince of Wales Elementary School