Use this Snow and Hail worksheet to review the names of snowflakes and sizes of hailstones through matching and coloring.
Snowflakes come in a large variety of shapes, but all snowflakes have six sides.
On some snowflake shapes it is very easy to see all six sides, but on other shapes it is a bit harder to see them. Here are some of the most basic shapes:
- Stellar dendrite snowflakes are the type of snowflake that usually comes to mind when you think about snowflakes. Stellar means star-like and dendrite means tree-like. So these snowflakes look like stars but the points of the star have little ‘branches’ on them.
- Hexagonal plate snowflakes are thin and made of solid ice. They look like dinner plates with six sides.
- Column snowflakes get their names because they are long and thin like the columns found on some buildings. If you look at a column snowflake closely, you can see that it has six sides.
- Needle snowflakes are very thin and long and look like needles. These snowflakes are so small that it is hard to see all six sides.
The individual pieces of hail are called hailstones.
The size of a hailstone is often described using names of common objects that are close to the size of the hailstones.
For example, pea-sized hail is the size of peas and golf-ball-sized hail is about the size of golf balls.
Hail is usually small, but it is not impossible for grapefruit or softball sized hail to fall when the weather conditions are just right!
To learn more about hail sizes, do the Naming Hailstones science project.
More Weather Projects:
