Third Grade

Third Grade was a great year! Mrs. Cowger taught our 2nd/3rd split class, and we all just fell in love with her. She had a way of really bringing the subjects we were studying to life. Years later I sent her a copy of the Book of Mormon and a different time the book Tuesdays with Morrie because she was such a great teacher.

Before the school year I had found the chapter books in the library but had been too intimidated to try reading them. I loved picture books! I was comfortable with picture books. Mrs. Cowger let me read a picture book for my first report, but after that she helped me pick out little chapter books. It was her passion for reading that helped me find my love for reading. I joined the Book It program, and earned a free pizza at Pizza Hut for every 5 books I read. I also joined the summer reading program and earned tons of prizes at the Public Library the following summer.

This was exactly the kind of teacher Mrs. Cowger was. You couldn't help wanting to learn in her class. She had lived in Africa for a while and would make the far away country seem something we could one day visit for ourselves. It just brought geography to life! She taught each grade a separate lesson, while the other class did work on a different subject. Not every teacher would be able to accomplish this task, but she did so with ease.

One day she brought in a huge caccoon she had found in her back yard for us to watch over until it hatched. We put it in a terrarium with grass, rocks and all kinds of things in it. Every day we would come in and check up on the caccoon to see how it was doing and if it showed signs of hatching. It felt like all year we waited for that thing to hatch! One day Mrs. Cowger was out for the day and we had a substitute. I came into the class after recess to check up on our sleeping friend, when I found the biggest moth I've ever seen had hatched! We were all so excited and couldn't wait for the next day to share our news with our teacher.

She found out the moth was called the Polyphemus Moth, so we named the day it joined our class (May 10th) Polyphemus Hatching Day! We celebrated, wrote an author in Arizona about it, and every year after that we were given a piece of candy if we stopped by to wish her current class a happy Polyphemus Hatching Day. I visited every year until I moved away from Michigan. And even for several years after I sent a card wishing Mrs. Cowger a happy Polyphemus Hatching Day.

We seemed to always be celebrating something in this class. We had a party and a cake for Snoopy's birthday, and all wrote letters to Charles Schulz the creator of Peanuts. Mrs. Cowger just loved Snoopy, so whenever we gave her a teacher's gift it had to have something to do with Snoopy.

This is the year I became friends with Anna Ravashot. She was in the Second Grade half of the class, but she was such a spunky fun girl that I couldn't help but become her friend. Her mother was divorced and she had a baby sitter watch her after school, so I didn't often get to go to her house, but when we did we got to do what ever we wanted. She taught me all the swear words and made up a secret club that we had to "swear" our allegiance to in order to become a member. She was a "wild" girl, but very fun to be around. I lost track of her after this year, but we had fun for that amount of time.

I also strengthened my friendship with Debbie Savage this year. We were in Girl Scouts together and her mother, Joyce, was our leader. She was the CFO of some company, was a sharp business woman and was a strong advocate in women. We learned all about famous women with careers and that made a difference in the world in Girl Scouts. Debbie would invite me over to spend the night regularly, and we would stay up late watching movies, playing games, and sneaking into their hot tub. Sometimes Debbie's older sister Lindsay would teach us cheerleading moves because she was in middle school cheerleading. Debbie was very religious and would regularly invite me to her church services (they had a band). It was always fun, but I remember thinking this wasn't as spiritual as church should be.

Looking back I wish I was more like Debbie as a kid. I never invited my friends to primary activities or merry miss activities although I never really knew when they were. They were always fun, and had some spiritual aspect to them as well. I should have been better when it came to inviting friends to Young Women's too. At this time Natalie Morris was my best friend at church. We lived about a mile away so we were in different Elementary Schools, but we would find time on Saturdays to bike to each other's houses, have sleepovers, or just go home from church with each other and spend Sunday playing.

We had the best imaginations! We would play for hours that her couch was a train and we were going on a cross country trip. Our Barbies would get into all kinds of trouble and would need to find quick escapes. We would sneak into Natalie's older brother Danny's room and steal his love notes to read and get ideas of what a "grown up" relationship should be like.

Third Grade was such a fun filled year with all kinds of friends, that I couldn't help but love life. Little did I know fourth grade would be the exact opposite and harder than any year of my life that far.