Cakes take a front row seat in many celebrations. Baking a delicious confection to share with friends is enhanced by the creativity that goes into designing the cake top. These decorated and embellished cake tops can tell a story that uniquely adds to the celebration at going away parties, weddings, baby showers, and especially birthdays.
Birthday celebrations are important events in many cultures. The art of decorating birthday cakes is just one of the many ways that art plays an important role in enhancing an important cultural tradition.
CHILDCRAFT is approaching a very important birthday:
2016 will be the 70th year that CHILDCRAFT has been dedicated to meeting the needs of young children and the dedicated people who work with them. One of the ways we are celebrating is to share this lesson plan with you:
Enjoy involving young children in conversations about birthdays and the traditions around these family celebrations while giving them an opportunity to create their own “Cake Top” art.
Lead In
You may want to start the conversation with young children about Birthday celebrations by sharing photos of decorated cakes. Encourage and expand children’s language as they share their own experiences or ideas about colors, shapes and images that they would like to incorporatedinto their Cake Top design.
Process Art
After introducing the materials and prompting children to create their own decorated “Cake Top”, be sure to remove any photos you have shared so that children will not feel they need to “copy from a model”. Encouraging children to experiment with the materials and explore the processes of art leads to higher level thinking and decision making skills -and averts the frustration of trying to duplicate adult level skills.
As each child experiments with their own unique “Cake Top” design, keep in mind the problem solving skills that emerge can foster innovation and enhance STEM thinking skills.
STEM plus A (Arts) = STEAM!
Your encouragement to enjoy the process of creating with art materials can have far reaching effects beyond enjoying “Cake Top” designs that reflect a child’s own expression. Children that are given opportunities to make choices, try new things and invent solutions within the process of creating art, may be the inventors, innovators and problem solvers of tomorrow.
The future prosperity of a nation depends on a workforce proficient in the latest technology and with a solid understanding of science, engineering and mathematics but what can set us apart is the ability to:
- See things in new ways
- Discover how to create something new.
- Think unconventionally
- Combine things in new ways
– all of these can happen when our children are engaged in the process of creating art!
Leave a Reply