This displays instructions for translating a shape in four different directions. Colours are included to insure the direction of movement corresponds to each instruction.

• Encourage students to tell a friend about each shape and the direction of movement. This is a good opportunity to practise vocabulary such as ‘horizontal’, ‘vertical’, ‘diagonal’ and ‘translated’.

This gives practice at reflecting shapes across a mirror line.

• If students struggle with reading the message, this activity could be done with a partner or solved letter by letter as a whole class. Alternatively, students could use a printed copy and a mirror to decode.

This gives practice at reflecting shapes across a mirror line.

• Students could use any shapes or pictures of shapes for example this Printable Master Rich task 1 - Question 1 - 2-D shapes, but attribute blocks work particularly well.
• This activity is best done with a partner to give opportunity for discussion as students check for an exact match with a mirror.
• You could use the examples to model by ‘thinking out loud’ about shape, direction and distance from the mirror line.

This takes you to an activity where students draw around and then rotate a shape.

• The three examples are shapes that tesselate, but students do not learn about tessellation at this level. The focus is on rotation.
• You could laminate copies of these 3 shapes or give students attribute blocks which will be easier to trace around.
• These shapes will rotate to form a larger shape with no gaps and without overlapping. Students could be challenged to see if they can find any other shapes that will do this.
• The discussion following the activity could be used to revise fractions, as parts of a whole. For example: the original triangle is 1/6th of the hexagon; 6 triangles are needed to make the whole.

This takes you to an activity where students have to decide which transformation a puzzle piece has undergone.

This takes you to two pictures. The second has 10 differences created by either reflection, rotation or translation. Students need to identify the difference and then say which transformation has been used to make the change.

• Depending on the ability of students you may need to copy these pictures, so students can number each difference and then indicate its transformation.

This displays an example of a pattern made by translation, reflection and rotation. Students are asked to decide the next item in the pattern and determine which transformation made the pattern.