Snowflake Bentley. Written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. Illustrated by Mary Azarian. Houghton Mifflin Company 1998.
If you’re an educator looking for a picture book to introduce your lesson on citizen science, try Snowflake Bentley, written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and illustrated by Mary Azarian. It’s the true story of Wilson Bentley, a Vermont farmer who discovered that no two snowflakes are alike through his lifetime of pioneering work photographing them. This is the book that sparked my interest in citizen science, and one that I used to explain the concept to my own kids.
Bentley had no formal scientific training. He started out studying snowflakes as a child at home on the family farm in Jericho, Vermont. Over the span of forty years, he captured more than 5,000 photos of individual snowflakes by attaching a microscope to a camera his parents purchased for him at the age of seventeen. He donated a collection of 500 of these photos to the Smithsonian, where they remain in the Smithsonian Institution Archives. Here are the Smithsonian’s image gallery and related educational resources.
Briggs Martin and Azarian’s Snowflake Bentley is beautifully illustrated, having won the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 1999. This compelling story of perseverance will keep kids interested as Bentley patiently waits for each winter snow and then perfects the process of working quickly to capture his photos before the snowflakes melt. Bentley’s work had a lasting impact through his collection of original photographs, his published book Snow Crystals (with William J. Humphries), and other scientific contributions. Among the wealth of possible wintertime classroom projects to accompany the story, try CoCoRaHS, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network. Let me know how it goes!
