Ice Cream Sculpturing
by Joanne Warren

We spoke about sculpting our lives. Picture someone sculpting a bust of Jesus. How do we sculpt? What must we do? And eventually is came out that we TAKE AWAY from the clay. We went on to say that often there are things we must "take away" in our lives in order for us to become the masterpiece we can be. (i.e. Rated R movies, profanity, immodesty, lure of the internet - websites, bad choices, etc....)

It was an excellent spiritual start & it led right into our ice cream sculpting.

Split the group up into several teams. Each team is given 1 gallon or 1/2 gallon of ice cream and tools to work with. They also get hard candies, sprinkles and cones to decorate their creations. (Buy the paper cartons, the they just peel them off and place on a plate for carving their masterpiece).  They can build whatever they want with their ice cream. Each team member receives an award, and the sculptures act as the refreshments.  (If you don't have many girls, have each girl be their own team).

Categories we chose were:

Most Creative
Funniest
Sloppiest
Tastiest
Cleanest
Most Realistic

That way we got to have fun but we also had a spiritual experience.

(I also gave them this handout)

Sculpting Our Lives

How do we sculpt? What must we do?
We must take away from the creation we
are perfecting. We must take away
negative things in our lives in order for
us to become the masterpiece we know
we can be. Will the sculpture you create
take you closer to the Lord?
Always remember that You are
God's sculptured masterpiece!
 

ANOTHER VERSION: (Credit Unknown)
 

This is basically what we did, and we also included the Bishop speaking first regarding how we need to sculpt our lives (taking away the parts we don't need to reveal the child that God sees underneath).  We divided the youth into groups of 4 and used gallon buckets of ice cream.  Then we dipped them in hot water to remove the whole thing to sculpt, while other teams scooped the ice cream out and molded it.  We found plastic gloves at the dollar store - 100 for a buck.  The kids also had straws for decorating, and used the Styrofoam bowls on the table that we put the candy, pretzel sticks etc. in.  We had stuff like licorice, m&ms, coconut, chocolate chips, jelly beans, sprinkles, etc. Then we let them get to work!  There were some tall sculptures, believe it or not!  The best of show was a tall ice cream soda - they somehow made the "glass" out of the bowls and covered them with ice cream!  We had two temples, a teletubbie, volcano, (pull apart Twizzlers made great lava), fort, theme park, and others I can't remember at the moment.  Toward the end we passed out pixie sticks, and they used those to sprinkle color on the sculptures.  We had judges and everyone got some kind of award and then we gave a grand prize and they got little sundae dishes.