Friday, December 10, 2010

Snow Much Fun!



We happened upon a great wintertime book.  It is called  The Story of Snow 
it has those amazing photographs of snowflakes on a microscope slide.  They are just beautiful. 
The book explains how snow crystals are formed and why they look like they do.
  
Did you know that snow crystals always have 6 arms or sides?  This is because water molecules attach themselves in groups of 6.  How interesting!

What the book doesn't include but should is instructions for cutting your own six sided snowflake, which is what we did after we read this book.  
I suggest using a slightly lighter weight paper than your typical printer paper.  It is really hard to cut through all of those layers and I ended up needing to cut every one's flakes which led to many tears.  Old fashioned typewriter paper, newsprint, origami or tissue paper would work very nicely.  We also used different sized paper hole punches for some of the details.



1 comment:

Afton said...

The nerd in me wonders how they were able to get those pics of the snowflakes under the microscope without the light melting them. Truly amazing and beautiful. I want to make snowflakes too! I-Shuan has the best snowflakes.