- Age:5+ (younger with help)
- Time:20 min
- Difficulty:Easy to medium
- Mess level:Low, paper scraps
- Supervision:Yes
🧒 In one sentence
Real snowflakes always have six arms, so fold your paper into six equal parts, not eight, before you cut.
Most of us learned to cut paper snowflakes the same way: fold a square in half, in half again, and once more, then snip. Unfold it and you get a beautiful flake with eight points. There's just one problem. Nature has never made a snowflake with eight arms.
Real snowflakes have six. In this guide you'll learn the six-fold method, which is only one fold different from the one you know, and you'll find out why water always freezes into six-sided shapes. It's a craft, a geometry lesson and a bit of chemistry in twenty minutes.
Paper snowflakes are door 3 in our STEM Advent Calendar.
Materials
- Square sheets of thin paper: printer paper, origami paper or tissue paper.
- Sharp scissors (child-safe scissors work if the paper is thin)
- A pencil
- Optional: the free folding guide and cutting templates from our printable (below)
Thin paper is important because of the number of layers we will have. The six-fold method stacks 12 layers, and thick paper is very hard to cut through. Coffee filters are perfect for smaller hands: they're thin, round and already soft.
Make a square from A4
Fold one short edge of an A4 sheet across to line up with a long edge, forming a triangle. Cut off the leftover strip, unfold, and you have a square.
How to fold a six-armed snowflake
The six-fold method. Step 3 is the one that's different from the traditional "easy" method.
- Fold the square in half, corner to corner, to make a triangle. Keep the folded edge at the bottom.
- Find the centre. Fold the triangle in half just enough to pinch a small mark in the middle of the folded edge, then open it again. That pinch is the centre of your snowflake.
- Fold into thirds. Imagine the folded bottom edge as a straight line through the centre point. A straight line is 180°, and you want three equal parts of 60° each. Fold the right corner up and across so its edge runs from the centre point at that angle, then fold the left corner over on top. Move the layers until the two side edges line up exactly with each other.
- Fold in half once more, bringing the two long edges together. You now have a narrow wedge, 12 layers thick, with an uneven top.
- Cut off the uneven top. A straight cut makes a hexagon outline, a cut that slopes down towards the folded edge makes pointy star arms, and a curved cut makes round petals.
- Cut shapes into both long edges: small triangles, half-circles, slits and steps. Never cut all the way across, or your snowflake will fall apart.
- Unfold slowly and press it flat under a heavy book for an hour.
Step 3 is the tricky one
Getting three exactly equal parts by eye takes practice. Our printable has a folding guide with the 60° lines drawn on it: lay your triangle on top with the centre point on the dot, fold along the lines, and the angles come out right every time. If your snowflake's arms come out slightly different lengths, the thirds were uneven. Try again: the second one is always better.
✂️ Free printable
STEM Advent Calendar printable
4 pages · 1 MB
Page 3 is the six-fold snowflake guide with three cutting templates (easy, medium and tricky). The pack also has the 24-door advent calendar to colour in and gift tags.
Eight arms or six? Try both
Make one snowflake the old way: fold the square into a triangle, then in half, then in half again, and cut. Make a second one with the six-fold method. Lay them side by side and ask: which one looks like a real snowflake? Then look at a snowflake on a winter coat sleeve, a photo of one, or the ❄️ on your keyboard, and count the arms.
Snowflake cutting ideas
- Little children (3 to 5): a grown-up does the folding, the child makes three or four big snips along the edges. Every result is a surprise, and that's part of the fun.
- Lace flakes: many small cuts close together, on both edges.
- Star flakes: cut the top into a sharp point and cut long thin slits towards the centre.
- Hidden picture: draw half a tree or half a heart along the folded edge and cut it out. When you unfold, you'll find six of them.
- Save the scraps: the tiny curly offcuts are perfect for the dancing snowflakes static electricity trick.
Design your snowflake before you cut
Choose the arm tips and decorations below and the tool draws your snowflake. Then it shows the folded wedge with every cut numbered, so you know exactly where the scissors go. You can also print a cutting sheet with the fold lines already on it.
Your snowflake
MediumForked tips
✂️ 5 snips with the scissors
❄️ 19 holes in the snowflake
✂️ How to cut it
Fold your paper into a narrow wedge first, then hold it with the point down, like the picture. Cut away the striped parts.
Fold first
- Fold a square of paper in half, corner to corner, to make a triangle.
- Fold the triangle into three equal parts, like a fan closing over itself.
- Fold in half once more. You now have a narrow wedge, 12 layers thick.
- 1Cut a small V into the top of the right fold, then one long slanted snip down to the left fold.
- 2Snip the point off at a slant.
- 3Cut 2 small triangles into the right fold. Each one opens into a diamond.
- 4Cut 1 half-circle into the left fold. It opens into a round hole.
- Unfold slowly and press it flat under a heavy book.
Twelve layers are thick. A grown-up can help with the small cuts.
The sheet has the fold lines and every cut printed on it, so there is nothing to copy by hand.
Keep the curiosity going
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See what you’ll get →Why do real snowflakes have six arms?
From one water molecule to a six-armed star, and how the temperature in the cloud changes the shape.
A snowflake starts as a tiny speck of dust high up in a cold cloud. Water vapour (water as an invisible gas) freezes onto the speck, molecule by molecule.
Each water molecule is made of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms, arranged in a bent shape, a bit like a boomerang. When water freezes, the molecules can't just pile up anyhow. Because of that bent shape, they hold on to each other in rings of six, and the rings join up into a honeycomb pattern. So every ice crystal starts out as a tiny six-sided plate or column.
As the crystal falls through the cloud, its six corners stick out furthest into the damp air, so they catch water vapour a little faster than the flat sides do. The corners grow into points, the points grow into arms, and the arms sprout branches. That's how a hexagon becomes a six-armed star.
You fold your paper the six-fold way and cut one small hole in the middle of the wedge, not touching any edge. How many holes do you find when you unfold it?
Make your prediction, then tap an answer to check!
Why do all six arms match?
Look closely at a real snowflake and the six arms are almost identical, as if someone had copied them. But nobody tells one arm what the others are doing. The secret is that all six arms grow at the same time, in the same air. As the flake tumbles through the cloud, it passes through slightly warmer, colder, damper and drier patches. Every change hits all six arms at once, so they all grow the same kind of branch at the same moment.
Are all snowflakes different?
Each snowflake takes its own path through the cloud, with its own mix of temperatures and dampness, so each one grows its own design. For big, branchy snowflakes, the chance of two being exactly the same is so tiny that scientists say it practically never happens. The smallest, simplest crystals (plain little hexagons) can look almost alike.
The temperature decides the shape
Snowflakes aren't all stars. In the 1930s the Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya became the first person to grow snowflakes in a laboratory, and he discovered that the shape depends on the temperature in the cloud:
- around −2 °C: thin six-sided plates
- around −5 °C: long thin needles and columns
- around −15 °C: the classic stars with branches
Nakaya liked to say that snowflakes are letters sent from the sky: if you can read their shape, you know what the weather was like up in the cloud where they grew.
Snowflake Bentley
Long before Nakaya, a farmer in Vermont, USA, named Wilson Bentley fell in love with snowflakes. In 1885, at 19, he took the first photograph of a single snowflake by attaching a microscope to a camera. He spent his life photographing them, more than 5,000 in all, and people called him "Snowflake Bentley". If it snows where you live, catch some flakes on a piece of black paper or a dark sleeve and look at them with a magnifying glass, the way Bentley did.
The maths: symmetry
A real snowflake has two kinds of (When a shape looks the same after you turn it, flip it, or look at it in a mirror.):
- Rotational symmetry: turn it by 60° (one sixth of a full turn) and it looks exactly the same. You can do that 6 times before you're back where you started.
- Mirror symmetry: it has 6 lines you could put a mirror on, and the reflection would complete the shape. Each line runs either along an arm or exactly halfway between two arms.
Your six-fold paper snowflake has both, and you can see why: the folds are the mirror lines. Hold a small mirror upright along one of the fold lines on your unfolded snowflake. Can you make the whole flake appear from just one half-arm?
🔬 Make it a real experiment
Fold three snowflakes: one folded in half twice (4 layers), one folded the eight-arm way (8 layers) and one folded the six-fold way (12 layers). In each, cut one small hole in the middle of the folded wedge, away from the edges. Before you unfold, predict how many holes each will have. Count them, and write the answers in a table. Can you find the rule that links the number of layers and the number of holes?
Questions to ask
- How many arms does a real snowflake have? How many does your old-style paper one have?
- Why do you think the arms of one snowflake match each other?
- If you cut one little dot, how many copies of it do you get? Why?
- Where else can you see six-sided shapes in nature? (Think of honeycombs, or the stone columns of the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.)
Hang your snowflakes in a window, string them into a garland, or glue them onto the front of a card.
Key takeaways
- Real snowflakes have six arms; paper snowflakes folded in half three times have eight.
- The six-fold method: triangle, find the centre, fold into thirds of 60°, fold in half, cut, unfold.
- Water molecules freeze in rings of six, so every ice crystal starts as a tiny hexagon and grows arms from its six corners.
- All six arms match because they grow at the same time in the same air; the cloud's temperature decides whether a crystal becomes a plate, a needle or a star.
- Every cut goes through all 12 layers, giving the snowflake rotational and mirror symmetry.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you fold a paper snowflake with six points?
Fold a square into a triangle, pinch the centre of the folded edge, then fold the triangle into three equal 60° parts from that centre point. Fold the result in half once more, cut off the uneven top, cut shapes into both edges and unfold.
Why do my paper snowflakes have eight points?
Folding a square in half three times divides it into eight equal parts, so every cut is repeated eight times. To get six arms like a real snowflake, fold the triangle into thirds instead of halves.
Why do snowflakes have six sides?
Water molecules have a bent shape, and when they freeze they link up in rings of six. Every ice crystal therefore starts as a tiny hexagon, and its six corners grow into six arms.
What is the best paper for paper snowflakes?
Thin paper: printer paper, origami paper, tissue paper or coffee filters. The six-fold method makes 12 layers, which is hard to cut through with thick paper or card.
How can young children make paper snowflakes?
An adult does the folding and the child makes a few big snips along the edges with child-safe scissors. Coffee filters are especially easy to fold and cut. Every snowflake is a surprise when it's unfolded.
Are any two snowflakes the same?
Large, branched snowflakes are practically never identical, because each one takes its own path through the cloud and grows in its own changing conditions. Tiny, simple ice crystals can look very similar.
If you liked folding six-armed snowflakes, keep the winter science going with a batch of fake snow that fizzes away with vinegar. And if you enjoy folding, try our origami house or the Möbius strip, a loop of paper with only one side.
Happy folding! We can't wait to see what snowflake designs you come up with.
