Story:"Goodness Gracious! These stars, moons, and planets are not only symmetrical left to right, but also top to bottom!"

Harold is blasting off for one last adventure! On his journey, his eye was drawn to many symmetrical sights in space. Invent a new sight for Harold to see that has at least TWO lines of symmetry!

Inspired by Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson; HarperCollins, 1998

Suggested manipulatives: Pattern blocks, Pentablocks, sticks or pencils to lay over shapes or small mirrors (if available) to look for symmetry. For younger children, you may want to use die-cut pattern block shapes for students to glue onto their design documentation.

Prep time: 5 minutes to gather blocks, pencils or mirrors (if available) and 20 minutes if you are going to make die-cut shapes for gluing.

Classroom time: Asking children to do their best work for each Math Vitamin assumes that some children will need a longer time than others. Ideally you want to offer a block of time for Math Vitamin projects and have another task available (writing, free exploration, etc.) for those students who finish work prior to their peers. For this project allow 20-45 minutes for students to work through all the steps.

How to individualize/stretch: For students who are just beginning to “see” symmetry, give them unifix cubes, color tiles or multilinks to start building designs. Once they have the idea of symmetry, give them four pattern blocks (two yellow hexagons and two blue parallelograms, for example) and ask them to make a design that looks the same on both sides. Watch to see how they interpret this and have them check with friends to see if friends agree that their design is symmetrical. The goal of this benchmark is to recognize symmetrical designs. For those students needing a stretch, ask them to create shapes with horizontal and vertical symmetry. Additional stretches could involve rotational symmetry as well.