On Monday we started off the week with an all-school assembly to share the results of our vote on the new school colors. The students council representatives marshaled this extensive process to make sure everyone’s opinion and voice was heard, and with an actual drumroll announced that bay blue and seashell white are TBS’s official main colors!

All our hard work on addition and subtraction with regrouping came in handy as we learned about important events in Berkeley’s history and worked with the dates. How long was The Depot a restaurant after it was a real railroad depot? How many years ago did Berkeley get its name? The mathematicians even regrouped across zeroes and placed seven local, historic events in order on a timeline.

For read aloud we have been enjoying The Phantom Tollbooth projected on the overhead so we can take a closer look at the illustrations and discuss the use of puns and the other ways the author plays with words. We have started the end-of-the-year reading assessments and can’t believe how far the third graders have come as readers!

In writing we continue to write and edit our family stories. We also wrote about ourselves for the class yearbook being put together by Dianna and Youval. Thank you for your time, organization, and artistic vision! We completed M and N in our cursive workbooks and some students are opting to put it all together by writing in cursive for final drafts of poems, notes, and choice time writing.

For science we wrapped up our explorations of gravity, states of matter, and different types of energy and documented our observations and conclusions into our science journals. For Super Science and Art on Friday, students rotated through stations centered around the theme of sound waves. We watched a video demonstrating what sound waves look like and how they are three dimensional, and then listened to sound go through different states of matter and through string and cups. Manipulating a slinky showed us how different types of sound waves move. This Wednesday we are BARTing and walking to the Exploratorium to focus on sound and light waves through a scavenger hunt.

We had our last visit to the orchard and garden at the Berkeley Youth Alternative where we went on a ladybug hunt and identified the types we found. Did you know there are over 5,000 different types? We also weeded around the herb garden and harvested seeds.

In Spanish students showed what they know by performing a cooking show of their fruit salad know how . . . then they got to enjoy the “fruits” of their labor!

We love our Friday morning time reading to grown ups and showing them what we have learned in third grade lately!