Hallway Display Idea for Delicious Pastel Desserts

Wayne Thiebaud dessert cakes have become a consistent and popular lesson in many art teacher repertoires. I have taught this lesson at the past three schools I have worked at and it always ends up becoming a slam dunk lesson that students both love and learn a lot from. This year, I chose to share this lesson with my 4th graders who are learning about 3-D geometric shapes in their math class. I detailed this lesson before on Coral vs. Salmon and you can read about my instructional process for the lesson here. In fact, my write-up of this lesson was my very first blog post back in 2009! I'm pretty sure the idea for this lesson came from a 2009 Arts & Activities of SchoolArts article, but I could not find it in my archives.

I put a fresh spin on this lesson in the way I displayed the student art work. I came up with the simple and fun idea of creating bakery awnings over each class's grouping of cakes. I asked the students to come up with a pretend alliterative name for their bakeries. They used their classroom teacher's name as a jumping off point. The store names the students came up with were "Mr. DeHaan's Delicious Desserts", "Mrs. Munn's Magnificient Munchables", "Mrs. Anderson's Appetizing Entrees", and "Mrs. Haggerty's Home-Made Honeycakes." I am really pleased with how the display turned out and it was super easy to put together. I cut a bunch of U-shaped pieces from scrap pieces of brightly colored paper. I glued them together and used half of a styrofoam egg carton taped to the wall to make the awnings pop out from the wall at an angle.