About two years ago, Karen Hatch got an unexpected message on her computer. An old classmate from nearly four decades before had stumbled across her on Facebook and decided to get in touch.

Way back in 1972-73 the two had been in the third grade together in Mrs. Bixler’s class at Bunche Elementary.

The two talked. They asked about other classmates whose names they remembered. They wondered what ever happened to their teacher. She was old, they recalled, but then, when you’re in third grade, all adults are old.

It was fun reminiscing. They recalled that their teacher had a practice of taking her students, two or three at a time, and inviting them to her house for dinner on Friday night.

“We were inner-city black kids, poor,” Hatch recalled. “We’d hang out at her house” for the evening and just have fun.

At school, the entire class played kickball, Hatch recalled, often the boys against the girls, and the girls played hopscotch.

Life was fun.

Third grade, when you think about it, is about the last of the magical years kids go through, when they’re all isolated in one class and they all know one another and they all get along.

Not long after that, everything begins to change. Kids start developing personalities. The smart kids begin to blossom. The timid and shy begin to shrink back. Bullies begin to emerge.

By fifth grade, Hatch said, the students in that third-grade class had already begun to split into their own little groups.

Many students try to keep in touch with those who went to high school with them. They have class reunions. But by the time graduation comes around, most of the relationships students had in third grade have been scattered to the wind.

So for more than a year, Hatch hunted up students in that third-grade class. Other classmates she had found helped search out even more class members. They found that the class had indeed scattered, to Washington state, California, Missouri, Georgia, Alabama and New York. Hatch herself had landed in Michigan.

Finally, Hatch suggested it would be nice to find out whether Mrs. Bixler was still around.

Within five minutes a fellow classmate had actually found her. The old Mrs. Bixler, it turns out, was only in her mid-20s when she taught at Bunche, and she’s still teaching, though no longer in the Fort Wayne schools.

Finally, Hatch came up with another idea. Why not have a reunion? It was sort of unheard of, a reunion of a third-grade class. So she set it up, two days’ worth of activities on May 26 and 27, Memorial Day weekend.

So far, Hatch has sent invitations to only 13 of her old classmates. She has the old class picture taken in the spring of that year, and there are four or so classmates whose names she doesn’t recall, so there are still people to be contacted. But she still has four months to find them.

Call it a last chance to relive your childhood.

Mrs. Bixler, by the way, was elated to hear about the reunion, Hatch said.