Reflective symmetry is the situation where you can draw a line through a shape and one side of the line will contain the mirror image of the other side. Let’s draw some shapes on the board and see if they have reflective symmetry. If they do, how many lines of symmetry do they have?

Exercise 1

Reflecting Shapes

Instead of finding lines of symmetry on shapes, we can use mirror lines to reflect a shape.

When we do this, the shape we are reflecting is called an object and its reflections is called an image.

Worked Example

Reflect the object drawn below in line X:

Exercise 2

Answers to both exercises