AUBURN — Cecile Bishop, 90, of Auburn brings much experience to her role as foster grandparent to prekindergarten students at Park Avenue School.

“Teaching is everything to me,” said the woman known as Grammie B. Her experience comes, in part, from being the oldest of 10 children and attending the one-room schoolhouse at Penley Corner in Auburn. She only spoke French then.

“I was in subprimary and it was a one-room schoolhouse with 15 children in seven different grades and one teacher,” she said. “What was good about it was that everybody talked. So I picked up a lot by listening. The teacher would ask me if I was daydreaming. I was listening. I was willing to learn.”

Even in those days, Bishop was helping children.

“There was a little girl who could only talk French. I’d show her something, and it was like playing house.” Bishop said she understands children who are trying to learn English as she once did.

When she was older, she said she worked in 4-H and taught children to sew, using feed bags with floral designs to make dish towels, aprons and pot holders. Flour sacks her father brought home were fashioned into clothing, pillowcases and diapers. Nothing was wasted.

“My sister made a dress out of a feed bag and she wore it to Chicago!” Bishop remembered with a laugh.

Her credentials also include working with kindergarteners learning catechism at St. Louis Church in Auburn.

“They did not think the little ones were old enough. I said, ‘I can teach them their prayers.’ And I did,” she said. “We made little games. I said to one child, ‘You be baby Jesus, and you be the angel.’ We had a ball.”

After her husband died, Bishop began working as a foster grandparent at Sherwood Heights School with teacher Becky Skillings. When Park Avenue School opened, she followed Skillings there, working with special needs children for a while, and now those in a multicultural setting.

She’s in the classroom from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. daily, much of that time in Sonia Finnegan’s prekindergarten room working with 4-year-olds. Among her duties is teaching them to write their names. “I sometimes put my hand over theirs to help them,” she said of her technique.

“I don’t give to one more than another. I give turns,” she said.

Comparing present school days to hers, she said one major difference is lunch.

Another major difference between her school days and those of today: Lunch.

“We brought our lunch from home. My mother made hogshead cheese and blood sausage.”

And in her day, they had only one book, “Dickie Dare.”

“We read all about ‘The Three Little Pigs’ and ‘Three Little Kittens.’ It surprised me that we are still reading ‘The Three Little Pigs.'”

There are some things that haven’t changed.