Make Your Own: Crystal Snowflakes

This project has been on my mental to-do list for at least a year, and thankfully, yesterday's snow day prompted me to finally make a real crystal snowflake with the kids. I got the idea and basic directions from this website. This project involves boiling water so it's definitely not one for kids to do on their own. Borax isn't something that everyone has at home, but it is definitely handy if you are interested in making your own laundry detergent or all-purpose green cleaning solution. The only things we changed were using a popsicle stick in place of a pencil to hold the snowflake in the jar, and I constructed the whole thing from white pipe cleaners instead of pipe cleaner and string. (Oh, and one small tip I learned by trial and error: if you think that maybe you can pour boiling water into a plastic peanut butter jar because you have one one hand, think again. It will immediately melt. Just saying. Enchanted Learning does apparently know better than I do when they say to use a glass jar.) This was a fun and simple science experiment and the kids were excited to wake up to find that crystals had really grown overnight. I think next year we will make several of these crystal snowflakes and either use them for Christmas ornaments, give them away as gifts, or perhaps hang them from the chandelier using fishing line.