Module 3 : Snowflake Bentley

Module 3
Snowflake Bentley

Reference
Martin, J. B. (1998). Snowflake Bentley. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Summary
A Caldecott winner and true story about the discovery of snowflakes and the efforts Willie Bentley made in order to photograph snowflakes. Bentley was finally able to capture images of snowflakes, share the images with others, and discovered that no two snowflakes are the same.

What I Thought
The story and the pictures are highlighted with facts about Willie Bentley within the margins of the pages, which are illustrated with drawings of snowflakes. Facts about Bentley and his photographs add to the history of the story while the story itself tells about this remarkable man and his determination to share his images with others before the snowflakes melted and disappeared forever.

What Others Thought
Azarian's (A Farmer's Alphabet) handsome woodcuts provide a homespun backdrop to Martin's (Grandmother Bryant's Pocket) brief biography of a farmboy born in 1865 on the Vermont snowbelt who never lost his fascination with snowflakes. Wilson A. Bentley spent 50 years pioneering the scientific study of ice crystals, and developed a technique of microphotography that allowed him to capture the hexagonal shapes and prove that no two snowflakes are alike. Martin conveys Bentley's passion in lyrical language (""snow was as beautiful as butterflies, or apple blossoms""), and punctuates her text with frequent sidebars packed with intriguing tidbits of information (though readers may be confused by the two that explain Bentley's solution of how to photograph the snowflakes). Hand-tinted with watercolors and firmly anchored in the rural 19th century, Azarian's woodcuts evoke an era of sleighs and woodstoves, front porches and barn doors, and their bold black lines provide visual contrast to the delicate snowflakes that float airily in the sidebars. A trio of Bentley's ground-breaking black-and-white photographs of snowflakes, along with a picture and quote from him about his love for his work, is the icing that tops off this attractive volume. Ages 4-8. (Sept.) - Publishers Weekly (1998, September 28). Retrieved from: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-395-86162-2

Ideas
Ideas for small children include folding paper and making their own snowflakes by cutting out designs from the folded paper. For the older children, bringing a microscope to the group to observe snowflakes, water, or other small items with the microscope to discover how difficult it is to see something so small and how those images can be reproduced by a camera. http://www.vickiblackwell.com/lit/bentley.html - includes instructions for making six-sided snowflakes, like those discovered by Bentley along with a bookmark to download and instructions for making woodcuts like those used for the illustrations in Snowflake Bentley.