Times Tables

A few seconds ago, I just completed my 'Big Times Tables Diploma, ' on Timestables.co.nz

In the past few weeks, I have been practising my times tables and trying to learn them by heart, and this website is a great place to learn and memorize them.

On the home page, you can click on any of the times tables you need to work on, and it will take you to the '5 Step Plan.'

First, they show you the answers so you can re-read and recite what they are. 

Then, you scroll down and have to write in order the answers underneath. 

Next, you drag and drop the answers into the squares. You're just repeating the times tables in different ways so it makes you comfortable with the multiplication.

Once you've finished the next step of re-writing the solutions into the muddled up boxes, you take a mini quiz of the times tables, before taking your diploma. If you get all your answers correct, you complete whichever diploma you chose. In this example, it was the sevens.

You get a medal for each times table you complete, and once you start recognizing and remembering them, you can move on to your Big Diploma that includes bits of all the times tables.
 👍

Graffiti - Art or Vandalism

Today everyone in my reading group presented a google slides on whether we thought graffiti is art or vandalism. Here is what I think.

Math is Back.

Hi! I am back in Gisborne and back at school. We arrived quite a while ago and today I will be sharing with you some maths I have recently learnt in class.
It's called B.E.D.M.A.S.
It stands for: Brackets, Exponents, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction. 

Enjoy!

My Chocolate Paradise

Exactly two days, eleven hours, and forty minutes ago, we went to a chocolate making workshop. The taste of icing may be permanently stuck on my tongue. It's in a kibbutz called Dafna, and in my opinion, it has the potential to out-do Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

First, we entered the chocolate store. All over the room there were chocolate shoes, footballs, teddy bears, and love hearts with all kinds of chocolate flavours. It got even better as we visited the museum.

The museum was only a room big, but you could see all the workers making chocolate through a glass wall. I was kind of hoping they would be short and orange with curly green hair, but oompa loompas or not, it was still awesome to watch the process of chocolate making. On the other side of the room, we could see the chocolate masterpieces - I had a few favourites.

After we had a look at the museum, we went to our chocolate workshop. A lady was waiting in a large room lined with tables. First, we were quizzed about the different types of chocolate, how to tell them apart, and its history. She let us taste chocolate without the sugar, and our reaction wasn't pretty.

Next, she scattered small, laminated drawings over the table. We picked our own, and I chose a cute, little mouse. The drawings were simple and easy to trace, which is exactly what we did with chocolate icing. We went over all the lines, and then filled the middle in with white chocolate, leaving just the outline.

While we waited for those to freeze, the lady squirted a thick strip of white chocolate across the table. She gave us a plate filled with sprinkles, another with coconut, and our own with four chocolate truffles. We got to decorate them. We rolled them into balls and dipped them in the white chocolate to stick our chosen toppings together. We could also keep them as cubes and just layer the top with the white chocolate, then design it with our leftover chocolate icing.

As we added the final touches to our truffles, our other creations had set. The lady called out our names and we came up to collect them - they turned out so well! We were sitting next some friendly americans, and we all joined in a celebratory picture.

Mission Impossible, Sort of.

Around a week ago, we went to another Escape Room in Rosh Pina ( a town in Israel. )
Since the last one was so fun, we decided to do a harder one at Inside Out.
We were in Paris, and our objective was to track down a terrorist group. According to the tape recorder I found in the second room; the terrorists had hidden a bomb. As part of the story, a recorded message from an agent informed us that we had to find it, put it in the 'Atomic Vault,' and quickly get in the bunker to avoid the explosion. After he finished explaining our mission, the sound of screaming and gunshots emitted from the tape recorder. Yikes.

First, we were on a 'train.' In that room we found a phone, which the lady running the Escape Room used to text us clues if we needed them. We managed to get out of that room pretty quickly.

The second room was the biggest and the hardest to escape from. There were lots of different spices in bowls on a table, and later we figured out that we had to smell them and compare them to the smell of some spices hidden in boxes. The spices in the bowls all had symbols sticking out of them. On the table, there was also a piece of paper with the symbols deciphered into numbers. We then used those numbers to open the lock under the table.

There were many different objects and things in the room, but some of them were just decoys to throw us off. I found the tape recorder in that room. Our last room was all about teamwork. In short, it was really tricky but we managed to find the bomb and put it in the vault. We finished in around an hour. 

Yay!

The Blood Moon...

There's a first time for everything.

A few nights ago, our entire family gathered around to watch the Lunar Eclipse. We walked over to our cousins, and they set up a telescope for a better view. Unfortunately, when I looked through all I saw was a reflection of my eyelash. It was my first Lunar Eclipse and the longest of the century. In between watching the moon, we had snacks and played games outside to pass the time.

It was a very long process but completely worth it. There were no clouds in the sky, and it was surrounded by shiny little stars. At first, the moon was its normal colour, but then it slowly started fading away and turning orange. By the time we went home, it was bright red,

and later it gradually turned back to grey.

There is a big difference between a Lunar Eclipse and a Solar Eclipse. A Solar Eclipse happens during the day and is when the Moon eats the Sun. A Lunar Eclipse happens at night and is when the Earth separates the Moon and the Sun - probably because they were trying to eat each other. The moon passes behind Earth and in front of the Sun, so the planets are aligned closely, with the Earth stuck in the middle.

We were extremely lucky; 

the Lunar Eclipse only happened in 

Europe, North Africa and the Mediterranean Countries!

Stolen Mona Lisa...

The Mona Lisa had gone missing...

and we had to find it.

Back in Kfar Blum, me, mum, dad, and my brother went to an Escape Room in another kibbutz near us.

An Escape Room is basically a game where you're trapped in a room, and you have to crack codes and solve riddles using clues to escape. A man told us the rules, and what we were going to be doing. We were private investigators who were sent to retrieve the stolen Mona Lisa, return it to the museum, and arrest the thief - Carmen Amzalez - before the museum opened to the public.

The first interactive escape room opened in Japan in 2007, and now there are over 1,850 in the US, 350 in the UK, and 408 in Canada. There are lots of different themes like: Bank Robberies and prison breaks, Crime investigations and Zombie apocalypses, and some you just need to escape the room.

Our time limit was an hour and we just reached it. It was so confusing; I don't even remember half of the things we did. There were all sorts of locks and hidden clues and riddles. There was artwork all over the walls like you would see in a museum, and random things that you would not see in a museum.
A bucket of different keys, a sandcastle, giant red buttons, etc. You had to really think outside of the box but despite the struggles, we found the Mona Lisa and managed to finish in precisely
59 minutes - a minute before our timer went off. We had so much fun and Leonardo Da Vinci would be proud.