Recognise a Reflection

In this activity, we will look at one of the transformations - reflection.

 The other transformations are rotation, translation and enlargement. 

A reflection is an image you can see in a mirror or glass or water.

We show the mirror line with a dashed line  - - - - - - - - - -

 We can see that the image is the same size and shape and the same distance away from the mirror line. 

Let's look at another reflection.

Example

Draw the image of the shape reflected in the mirror line:

Answer

To make this easy, we plot the points by counting the distance each point is from the mirror line.

See below:

Then we join them up to form the image:

We can see that the two shapes are:

1)  the same size

2)  the same distance from the mirror line

3)  facing opposite directions (some people call this 'flipped')

Let's try some questions!