Observing Snowflakes

A while back, I was cutting out paper snowflakes with the kids and we were having a nice time together. While we looked at all the different patterns we had made and how pretty they were, one of the kids said something like, 'but real snowflakes are just round.' I said that no, there were tiny patterns on real snowflakes too, but I couldn't really show them for themselves.

Well, we had a beautiful snow today. Lots of fluffy flakes, falling gently, not too cold. Perfect. So I grabbed some scraps of dark fabric and we went outside to catch some snowflakes.

It didn't take long before we had a good sampling to look at.

Sure enough, we found that the icy crystals actually had tiny, delicate patterns, just like our paper snowflakes did. It was so great to watch the kids as they looked at individual snowflakes and declared this one or that one to be the prettiest.