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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 translation of shapes?

What is translation?
We explain what the term translation means in primary-school geometry and how children are taught to translate a shape on squared paper and to combine coordinates with translation of shapes.

What is translation?

In geometry translation means moving a shape into a different position, without changing it in any way.

In Year 5 children are introduced to shape translation by giving them shapes on squared paper; they then need to be moved a certain number of squares up, down, left or right.  

Translating shapes in KS2

A child might be given a shape on squared paper like this (the rectangle in blue) and then asked to translate it 5 down and 6 to the right, resulting in the rectangle in red:

A good way to start making this concept clear to children is to give them a cut-out shape to physically move across the page.

Later, children need to learn to be able to translate a shape without this support.

A good way to teach them to do this is to encourage them to concentrate on each point of the shape at a time. For example: when doing the above task, it would be best to start by putting the point of your pencil on the top left hand corner of the shape and then moving your pencil down 5 and right 6, then plotting the first point of your new shape with a dot.

You would then need to do the same with the top right hand corner of the shape, the bottom left and then the bottom right.

Children may be asked questions that combine coordinates with translation, for example, they may be given a shape on a coordinates grid:

An example question they may be asked could be:

What will the co-ordinates of point A be when this square is translated 3 to the right and 4 up?

To answer this, they would need to translate the square and then give the co-ordinates of point A on the new shape, which would be (8, 9).

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