Paper Mâché with Kids // Ice Cream Sundaes

There is always a very strong reaction from the kids when we do paper mâché. Some kids love it — i mean really love it — and others do not want to get that oozy stuff on their hands. But all of them say “ewww!!” the whole time they are working! It’s quite funny actually, how the feel and smell and sight of the paste gives them all such a visceral reaction. I love it. It’s why I keep doing paper mâché because it uses all of the senses (yes — they taste it, too)!

This time, we made ice-cream sundaes. It was a fantastic, multi-step project that they couldn’t wait to work on each time they came back to class. The funny thing was, they all wanted to give them to their dads. There must be something about ice cream that reminded them of dad (could it be that dad’s ice-cream sneaking is not so sneaky after all?). Ha!

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Supplies:

~ Cereal boxes

~ Masking tape

~ Tin foil (light weight)

~ Newspaper cut into strips

~ Paper mâché paste (flour and water)

~ Tempera paint

~ Colored paper cut into little bits for sprinkles

~ Elmer’s glue

~ Red pom-poms

Process:

1. Make the ice-cream dish from a cereal box. Cut it like the drawing above, folding in the sides and taping them with masking tape. Mine were about 7″ – 8″ in length and about 1.5″ high.

2. Crumple up some tin foil into balls. This part was super fun for them, they could have just done this all day!

2. For the paste, I mixed flour with water using an electric mixer. I made it resemble pancake batter. The kids dipped their newspaper strip, then used two finger (one on each side of the strip) to squeegee off the excess paste.

3. They covered their dishes first, then the ice-cream scoops. It’s hard to make the paper stick to the tin foil at first. They needed help with this part. It just takes a bigger hand to mush it all in. Once a few pieces were on then they could do the rest. They covered them until you couldn’t see any more tin foil. After the kids left, I went back and squeezed any excess paste out of the ice-cream scoops and made sure the paper was a smooth as possible.

4. Let the paper mâché dry for a day or longer (it needs to be 100% hard and crusty, or else mold could develop). We dried ours for a week, until the next class.

5. Once dry, it was time to paint! We talked about their favorite flavors during the first class, so I mixed some of those colors.

6. My biggest surprise for them was the chocolate syrup! It was tempera paint in squeeze bottles. Super realistic!

7. The finishing touches were sprinkles and cherries. I brought out the glue for the cherries just to make sure they would be secure.

They came back on the third class, and…voilà! Their ice cream was done and ready to serve to daddy. They all decided that they were going to put them in the freezer and trick them into thinking it was real. Ha! I love four-year olds.

One thing we had talked about doing was making whipped cream. They really, really wanted to put whipped cream around their scoops. So on day three, when all the everything was dry, I quickly whipped up a batch of white stuff (cornstarch and water) and they stuffed it in their dishes. I didn’t really take good pictures of this because it all happened so fast (and my fingers were covered in cornstarch). But I also thought of using cotton balls, white tissue paper, or white model magic.

We love making ice-cream art!!

xo, Bar

{PS: Here is another cardboard ice-cream project we did last year.}