DLTK's Educational Activities
Kk is for Kaleidoscope

Thanks to Sharra for sending this in!!

This is an easy 'paper kaleidoscope' (not one of the ones you look through) that is fun for young children to put together.

Sharra says:  "Keep in mind kaleidoscopes work with three mirrors inside.  These mirrors reflect back and forth creating 6 segments or views of one original triangular area.  The views mirror each other and line up in such a way as to create a beautifully symmetric pattern from anything you are looking at through the scope.   Some scopes include colored pieces of plastic at the bottom of the scope. Hence my idea to simply use colored shapes children could recognize: square, rectangle, triangle, circle, heart, oval, diamond.  What I have done here is create one pie slice and a mirror image of that slice and repeated them three times.  The magic is in how you glue the slices together.  Here's the one Stephanie did for her alphabet book. I printed the label for her.  This was in the days before she started writing much."

• Close the template window after printing to return to this screen.
• Set page margins to zero if you have trouble fitting the template on one page (FILE, PAGE SETUP or FILE, PRINTER SETUP in most browsers).

Template for color printer

sorry, there's no B&W version for this project)

Printable version of these instructions