I've volunteered to demonstrate cake decorating at my daughters school but I'm not exactly sure what to do. I'll have about 7 different groups with 6 to 9 kids in each group. We'll only have 30 minutes so I'm a little stuck on what to do. I was thinking flowers or letting them just play with the fondant and decorating a dummy cake. I'm just not sure what can be accomplished with 7 different kids in 30 minutes. Any suggestions? TIA!

Just give them some cupcakes and some bags of icing with different colors/tips.

30 mins is not alot of time, and the younger kids have shorter attention spans. The younger ones are going to want to play more than actually learn how to do anything.

You can show them how to do a dot and a star, then let them have at it.

How about showing the kids the star/ star fill in technique. It's pretty simple and something they could pick up fairly easily. Either working on a dummy cake or having them frost the cake then use a cookie cutter to make a mark as a guide for the space to fill in. That way it also works as a starting point for what they can do in the future for decorating as they could use different cutters and different colored frosting to make tons of different designs with just using the star fill in technique.

Using fondant would be great too. Kids love hands on activities and it works just like play dough so it would be something they're familiar with. Have them roll out the fondant and again using cookie cutters have them place it on the cake. Now they would know how to decorate a cake with fondant cut outs and you could always show them layering them with different sizes of the same shape. That would probably work best with circles or squares, basic shapes.

Hope this helps.

Definitely go for cupcakes, then they can keep/eat their creation...it's no fun for kids to do cake decorating on a dummy.