Make a Snowflake

You Will Need:

• Paper (or our printable snowflake templates)
• Scissors

Recreate it:

You'll need to fold your paper in a special way to get a snowflake. The templates can help you with that! Once you've folded up your paper until it is just one triangle, cut out a snowflake shape. Remember not to cut out a hole in the middle! Unfold it to reveal your six pointed snowflake!

Tiny tiny droplets of water collect in clouds and as the temperature drops and gets cold enough to freeze water, these droplets start to stick together. Once these collections of frozen droplets gets large and heavy enough they will fall as snow. To get big and heavy enough these droplets have to freeze and form around dust.

The reason for the six points comes from simple geometry. If we take circular objects and try and arrange them so that one of the objects is in the middle and the others are all touching around the outside of that first one you'll find that exactly six fit in that outer circle. So there will be one in the middle, and six more around that perfectly touching. If the objects are all the same size, it doesn't matter how big or small these objects are - the six-around-one-in-the-middle rule will always be true. That's where the six points in our snowflake come from - there is one blob of frozen water in the middle and we can fit six more around it and that six-fold symmetry goes outwards from there!