5th Grade
At PS 8 since 2005
Melissa Browning attended PS 8 from Kindergarten through 7th grade and arrived here again in 2005 to teach third grade. “I’m thrilled to be back and to see the school thriving,” she says. “You just have a feeling that good things are happening. It’s a strong community with lots of exciting curricular opportunities too.”
Melissa feels fortunate to work at a school where she can bring her own strengths and interests to the curriculum – for example, environmental sustainability. One year, her third grade students discussed the importance of “Being Green” all year long and are completed a class environmentalist handbook, which covered issues such as global warming, energy efficiency and recycling. Students conducted research, wrote articles, poems, and letters, and created their own works of art to document their new-found knowledge and understanding. To bring the curriculum to life, Ms. Browning always aims to connect reading, writing, social studies, science and the arts.
“Cross-curricular activities are great because you draw on so many of the students’ strengths by fusing social studies with writing, research, and art,” she says. “By dealing with real issues you are giving students responsibility. You’re upping the expectations and they respond to it because it’s real and they love to be the bearers of information. When you let them, they really find their niche. Some gravitate to social studies, some to geography, others to art.”
Ms. Browning grew up in Brooklyn Heights, immersed in the art world–her parents run the World Music Institute–and she now lives in Fort Greene. She earned her master’s degree in Childhood Education from Hunter College and her undergraduate degree in Sociology from Bard College where she also studied printmaking and Italian, and was a competitive figure skater. (She still teaches skating after school.) In her spare time, Melissa loves to cook and travel. “It took me three years to refine my recipe for pizza dough,” she says with a laugh. “I even grilled pizza once.” In recent years Melissa has made trips to Italy, England, Scotland, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the Pacific Northwest, and . Alaska – where she spent a month hiking, kayaking, visiting glaciers, and viewing wildlife.
