Snowflake Bentley

Azarian, Mary & Jaqueline Briggs Martin. (1998). Snowflake Bentley.

This is a story about Wilson Bentley, a man born on a farm in Vermont in the late 1800s. Wilson's favorite thing is and has always been snow. On his fifteenth birthday his mother gave him a microscope which he used to examine snowflakes. Bentley loved snowflakes so much he decided that he would have to come up with a plan to preserve snowflakes. No one helped Bentley because they did not know how. Eventually, Bentley figured out a way to save snowflakes so that he could share them with the world. Before Bentley's death in 1931 he was considered the leader in snowflake preservation. More information is available about the interesting and remarkable man at the Buffalo Museum of Science's digital library. This book is a wonderful book to use with young readers, grades K-4, to teach them not only about Wilson Bentley but also about how are snowflakes are formed. This story is classified as a Picture book in which it won the Caldecott Award in 1999. You can also find the non-ficton biography of Wilson Bentley on a 2003 video.