Is your face symmetrical? Great Maths Lesson

This week we have been looking at Geometry, Symmetry and tessellation and as a part of this we got our kids to use their school photograph and see if their face actually was symmetrical.  Surprisingly to  nearly all of them realised that their face was far from symmetrical but had great fun doing this activity and learnt a great deal from it.

In doing this our student learnt about lines of symmetry and mirror imaging  We just used Microsoft Paint but any number of free programs such as Paint.net will achieve the same results.  Follow these simple steps to complete the task.

1: Load a photo of yourself in Paint ( we just used our school photos because they were a great portrait picture.  If you have none of these you may have to take some pics of your kids first.

2:  Click the select tool and select half the face the nose as this will be your line of symmetry.  You need to make a copy of your selection.

3:  Paste the copied selection back on top of the original photo.

4:  Click on the rotate button and select flip horizontal.

5:  Move the selected flip so that it aligns as best with the rest of the photo.  then ask yourself is your face really symmetrical.

As an extension task you might like to get you kids to use google images and find the lines of symmerty in objects such as flowers, fruit and shapes.  Discuss the lines of human symmetry and it would also be worth looking at the famous Da Vinci Picture - the art of man