Mirror Illusions

We peek in a mirror to see how we look, but in reality we aren't seeing what we really look like to other people! Try these activities to experiment with mirrors.

Materials:

• Paper
• Bathroom mirror
• A picture of yourself
• Handheld mirror
• Soup spoon

Activity 1

1. Look at yourself in the bathroom mirror. Is the image you see the same as what other people see when they look at you? What side is your hair parted on? Do you have any freckles or dimples on one side of your face?
2. Now hold up the picture of yourself and look at it. Compare it to your reflection in the mirror. Is your hair parted on the same side in the picture? Are your freckles or dimples in the same place? Turn the picture around and look at its reflection in the mirror. What does it look like now?

Mirrors work by reflecting light that bounces off your face back into your eyes. The resulting image is reversed, or backwards. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you see everything on the opposite side from how another person sees you. The picture from a camera shows an unreversed image of your face, but if you look at a reflection of the picture in the mirror, it will be reversed again.

Activity 2

1. Write out the alphabet in capital letters on a piece of paper and hold it up in front of a mirror. Since the image is reversed, most of the letters will be backwards - but not all! See if you can find and circle the eleven letters that look normal. These letters are vertically symmetrical, meaning that if you sliced them in half, each half would be the exact opposite ("mirror image") of the other half. See if you can make some words out of those letters and read them in the mirror - but be careful; just because the letters appear correctly doesn't mean they will be in the right order! Is there any way you can write a message readable in the mirror? Try to figure it out.
2. Take the handheld mirror and set it up vertically on the piece of paper just above the alphabet. Most of the letters will look upside down in the mirror, but there are nine that will look normal. These letters are horizontally symmetrical: if you cut the letter in half from side to side, the top and bottom would are mirror images of each other. Try making words of these letters and reading them in the mirror

A mirror code would be pretty hard to write in, if you only have 9 or 11 letters to work with! Of course, you could just learn how to write your alphabet backwards and write your letters that way!

Activity 3

Stand in front of the bathroom mirror, then hold up the handheld mirror in front of you so it faces the bathroom mirror, too. How many "yous" do you see? You probably see too many of you to count. This is because the handheld mirror reflects the reflection in the bathroom mirror which reflects the reflection of the handheld mirror...and on and on!

Activity 4

Even though a bathroom mirror reverses your image, it is still a fairly accurate representation of what you look like. Not all mirrors are that way, though. If you've ever been in the "funhouse" at the fair, you know that sometimes mirrors can make you look very strange indeed. These mirrors are curved. If the mirror is curved out toward you, it is a concave and will make you look tall and skinny. You probably don't have carnival mirrors in your house, but try looking at your reflection in a large soup spoon. Does your reflection look different on the back of the spoon than on the front?

Website artwork, text and images Copyright © 2009 Home Training Tools, Ltd. All rights reserved.