Watercolor Snowflakes STEAM Activity

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Watercolor Snowflakes

Making paper watercolor snowflakes is a favorite winter craft around here. Even though the kids are teens, they still like to experiment with folding and cutting to see what patterns emerge.

Sometimes we make paper snowflakes out of printer paper. Other times we use coffee filters. (My favorite.) Sometimes we leave the snowflakes white and other times we color them with crayons, markers, or paint. It just depends on how creative the kids are that day.

Related post: Snowflake Crafts

Watercolor snowflakes made from paper are a great way to add a little art and creativity into your homeschool day, but they also teach more.

Cutting paper snowflakes teaches patterns, prediction, and sequencing. The person cutting the snowflake can see the results of the cuts they have made and use that information to create shapes in subsequent snowflakes. They learn to predict what type of shape is produced by a certain type of cut. They can, also, predict how many of those shapes the cut will create.

Patterns, sequencing, and prediction are all important mathematics skills. Creating paper snowflakes makes learning these skills fun.

This week, we decided to use watercolors to add color to our snowflakes. I like to use watercolor in tubes. The colors are so much more vibrant and can be diluted to varying color saturations.

You can use watercolors to color paper snowflakes with your kids to teach about color, color-mixing, and dilution. Try adding different amounts of water to the paint. Try using different painting methods like a brush or even an eyedropper or pipette.

To learn about the science of actual snowflakes, try these posts: Snowflake Science Printable Lesson and Snowflake Study Resources

We used coffee filters to create our snowflakes. They already have the round outside edge and I like the way the filter paper looks more delicate than printer paper. Coffee filters, also, are great when using watercolors. The paint tends to migrate through the paper depending upon the amount of water used. The colors blend together sometimes to create interesting shades.

Try this with your kids using different paints and methods. We even tried a wax resist with crayons and it turned out cool. Just be very careful. The crayon can tear the filter paper easily if the crayon is pressed too hard.

Try creating watercolor snowflakes with your kids. Discover all the patterns and designs that you can create. Experiment with color and paint. Have fun with it!

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