NCERT Solutions for Class 5th Maths Chapter 10 Symmetrical patterns with vegetable blocks — Project Work
Book page 141 Updated on2026-09-19
Q1.
Create symmetrical patterns and designs using vegetable blocks. Some are shown below.
(a)
(b)
(a) A lady’s finger, its cut face — a five-armed star — and the flowers printed with it. (b) Potatoes cut in half, and the striped prints made with them.
Answer
Cut a vegetable across, dip the cut face in colour, and press it on paper again and again to build a pattern. The book shows two examples: a lady's finger (bhindi) and a potato.
What you need: a lady's finger, a potato, poster colour or diluted paint in a saucer, a sheet of paper, and a blunt knife (ask an elder to cut for you).
Method — step by step:
Cut the lady's finger straight across. Its cut face is a small star with five arms — a ready-made symmetrical block.
Dip the cut face in colour. Press it once on a rough sheet to remove extra colour.
Press it on your paper. You get one star.
Print more stars round a centre point — up, right, down, left. Your design now looks the same after every 1/4 turn.
For the potato, cut it in half and carve a simple shape on the flat face — a leaf, a triangle, or stripes. Print with it the same way.
Test your design. Fold the paper to look for lines of symmetry. Turn the paper to see if it looks the same after a part-turn.
One vegetable block, printed again and again, builds a symmetrical design.
Sample answer: I cut a lady's finger across. The cut face made a small five-armed star. I printed one star in the middle of my sheet and four more round it — above, below, left and right. The finished pattern looks the same after every 1/4 turn, and it also folds along four lines. Then I carved a leaf on half a potato and printed a border of leaves all round the sheet, turning the potato a quarter turn at each corner.
Why vegetable blocks work so well: The same block prints the same shape every time. So the pieces of your pattern are certain to be equal — and equal pieces, placed evenly, is exactly what makes a design symmetrical. This is the same idea the block printers of Rajasthan use on cloth.