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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

What is rotation of shapes?

What is rotation?
We explain what the term rotation means in geometry, how primary-school children are taught to rotate shapes clockwise or anticlockwise or about the centre, and how to combine rotation with coordinates.

What is rotation of shapes?

Rotating shapes means moving them around a fixed point (clockwise or anticlockwise, and by a certain number of degrees). The shape itself stays exactly the same, but its position in the space will change.

 

How to rotate shapes

Children need to have a good knowledge of angles before they can carry out tasks involving rotating shapes. They need to know off-by-heart that 90˚ is a quarter turn, 180˚ degrees a half turn, 270˚ a three-quarter turn and 360˚ a full turn.

They may be given a shape like the following one in blue and asked to rotate it 90˚ clockwise about the vertex marked with the red dot:

They should end up with a new shape (in red; the original shape is still shown in blue) like this:

Alternatively, they may be given a shape and asked to rotate it about its centre. In this case, someone started with the pink shape and rotated it 180˚ anticlockwise about the vertex marked with the red cross, resulting in the green shape:

It is a good idea to give children cut-out shapes so that they can physically rotate the shapes to gain a better understanding of this concept. They then need to move onto being able to work out how to rotate the shapes without this support.

Rotating shapes and coordinates

Questions on rotation can be combined with coordinates. For example, a child might be shown this shape:

They might be asked the following question:

If this shape is rotated 90˚ clockwise about point B, what will the co-ordinates of point A be on the newly rotated shape? 

They would then need to rotate the shape (mentally or with the help of a small square) and see where point A would be on the rotated shape (5, 9).

Shapes can also be reflected In a mirror line and translated.