Snowflakes

I made my first intricate, elaborate snowflake just now. I may be the only mom who doesn’t know how to do this, but in case I’m not, I wanted to share this with my readers.

One tip I learned from another video is the less paper that shows, the prettier your snowflake will look. The most important thing to know is the correct way to fold the paper to get a six-sided shape.

Here are some more of the snowflakes Garrett and Fiona and Emma and I made.

Snowflake Bentley

If these videos and pictures of snowflakes make you want to learn more about snowflakes, you should read this book about a man who studied snowflakes for 50 years! Snowflake Bentley (Wilson A. Bentley) was the first person to photograph a snow crystal. He developed his own camera, using a microscope with a bellows camera, after years of trial and error. He kept on trying even though lots of people thought it was silly to care so much about snow since it was as common as dirt where he lived in Vermont. He was the one who made the amazing discovery that no two snowflakes are alike.

Here is a wonderful article about a mother reading the picture book, Snowflake Bentley, by Jaqueline Briggs Martin, to her children. She is a very good writer. She also reviews another book about snowflakes in this article.

Here is the official website of Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley.

This site reviews the book Snowflake Bentley and gives lots of ideas for a unit study about snow.

Here is a really neat website that focuses on the art aspect of the picture book, Snowflake Bentley. She gives some neat ideas of art projects that you can do with your children that relate to the book and would make it even more fun.

At the Snowflake Bentley Exhibit you can see the actual photographs that he took and see the camera he invented to enable him to photograph these fast-melting wonders of nature. You can also play a snowflake-matching game. At the bottom of the page you can click on the button that says Snowflake Display and see Original Wilson Bentley images.

Here’s a short biography of Wilson Bentley.

A fun quiz to take that could take you or your child from rags to riches faster than Wilson Bentley did!

“There are several project packs and lapbook packs related to snow at Hands of a Child. Just type in “snow” in the search box.

And there are two snow freebies from Currclick on this page. Just scroll down to the two titles that start with “snow”.