Emma St. Dennis - Executive Assistant to the President/CEO of Conner Prairie

Welcome to my blog this year – “Our Favorite Things.” As the executive assistant to the President and CEO I have the opportunity to work with Ellen and our board of directors on a daily basis. I’ve been on staff for a year now and really enjoy the daily variety that comes with this position.

 The focus of my blog will be to share the exploits of five of my favorite people. Emma, 11, her sister Ella Rose 7, cousins Logan 7 and his sister Eliza 3, and youngest cousin Beau almost 3. Being Mamaw to this handful is the best job ever!

As a long-time member of Conner Prairie, I first brought my oldest daughter here in 1978 – and we’ve been coming back ever since – first with my three girls and now with the five grandkids.

Our entire family has made Conner Prairie the place to create lots of memories. We have a tradition of attending the 4th of July symphony concert and we never miss Headless Horseman in October. The best memories are the in-between times – from throwing tomahawks in Lenape Village, walking on stilts in Prairietown, visiting the barn with all the young animals or even riding a circular bicycle big enough for all of us during Maker Faire. Stay tuned all this year to see what this active group is doing next.

A visit is never complete until we have visited Discovery Station inside the museum center, especially during the winter. We come often for a tea party, play with the trains and of course, milk the cow! Playing “store” and purchasing bread and vegetables in the market is always a highlight. Best of all, there are comfy “big kids” chairs for the when the grandkids outlast Mamaw!

 Meet Conner Prairie's Staff Bloggers!

Pam Jackson: Guest Blogger - Guest Services

The first month of 2012 has flown by, and usually by mid-winter things are pretty quiet in central Indiana. However, 2012 is no ordinary winter in Indianapolis!

Being from Oklahoma, I’ve been a football fan as long as I can remember, but I didn’t become a pro football fan until I moved to Indiana in the 1990s. This past Colts season was heartbreaking for lots of fans, but the excitement of Indianapolis hosting Superbowl XLVI has helped ease the pain. I won’t be attending the big game, unless “attending” means sitting in my living room with friends and lots of snacks, but just being this close makes me feel part of the action.
 
Conner Prairie is getting in on the excitement of Super Bowl XLVI, too. Even though downtown Indy is a good distance from Fishers, we hope to be able to welcome not only out-of-town guests, but lure back some of the locals with our Super Cars exhibit Feb. 2-5, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Check out Conner Prairie’s homepage for details about this special weekend activity. And for those who mourn the end of football season, good news! Our Science Lab is hosting The Science of Football during the months of February and March. Come learn all about the game and extend the season just a little longer.

Don’t forget about us after the big game, though. We still have our indoor exhibits open, including Discovery Station, the new Science Lab exhibit, and Craft Corner. If the kids are getting restless during February and March, The Welcome Center has plenty to offer to relieve cabin fever!

Jenna Gehlhausen: Guest Blogger - Horizon Council Communications

2012 is an exciting year for me, because this will be the first full year that I’ll be a member of the Conner Prairie Horizon Council. On one hand, despite the cliché, I feel like it was just yesterday that I joined. On the other hand, I feel like I’ve been with the organization forever, and I mean that in the best possible way.

I joined the CPHC in the summer of 2011 alongside my best friend. She and her family have always been fans of Conner Prairie, and she had learned about the CPHC through one of her recent visits. At her urging, I signed up for the newsletters and dedicated myself to my first meeting.

The first meeting was completely galvanizing. It brought back a flood of memories that I had about Conner Prairie as a child and I left with questions about how I had let my life become so busy that I had failed to visit Conner Prairie for so long, and questions about how I could possibly prevent someone else from falling into a pattern of inactivity.

But I had already started to answer that last question by joining the Horizon Council which is a group of young professionals looking to drive our demographic to Conner Prairie. There’s more than enough exciting things to do here – we just need to remind our peers that we’re still the same amazing Conner Prairie that you remember as a child.

My role with CPHC is to keep everyone in the loop. When you get so many amazing professionals into one group, the logistics of meeting and organizing can become a real mess. Fortunately, all the CPHC members are wholeheartedly committed to the group, which makes my job a little easier. 

I can’t wait to see what the future has in store not just for us, but for Conner Prairie. If you’re a young professional and love Conner Prairie, please consider checking us out. We’d love to have you!

Rosie Arnold - Education Programs Manager

Hi! My name is Rosie Arnold, and I’m Conner Prairie’s Education Programs Manager. That means I spend most of my time creating programs and activities for both our school and general audiences.

I recently finished grad school, and so my head is still full of research data and technical terminology. One of my favorite things I learned in grad school was a concept called informal or “free-choice” learning. Essentially this means any kind of learning that takes place outside the traditional classroom setting, like watching TV, attending a play, or (most importantly for me) visiting a museum. This type of learning is particularly powerful because it is driven by people’s interests. We are all free to choose when, where, and what to learn. Best of all, research shows that free-choice learning works best when people are having fun!

So that’s my job- to make learning fun. To do that, I ask myself a few simple questions.

1.    Do I like what I’m working on? If I don’t like a program I’m creating, how could I expect anyone else to like it either?
2.    Would a kid like what I’m working on? What would my fourth-grade self have thought about this activity? If she wouldn’t have liked it or understood it, fix it. 
3.    Am I creating a “real” experience? I can’t tell you how often we get asked if our fires/bugs/food/buildings/you-name-it are real. (For the record, the answer is almost always yes.) I plan to elaborate on this phenomenon in a later post. For now I’ll just say that most of us live our lives on a screen, so my goal is to create experiences where people can put those away for a while and instead focus on something authentic, tangible, and, dare I say, real.  
4.    How can I make a “required” subject exciting? Conner Prairie serves approximately 50,000 students a year, and there’s no getting around the fact that most of them must meet certain academic standards. But there’s also no reason we can’t help students learn about required (and therefore often perceived by kids as boring) subjects in a fun way. Need to learn about the causes of removal of Native American Indian groups in Indiana? Go talk to a real member of the Lenape tribe, in Lenapehoking. Have to observe, compare, and record the physical characteristics of animals? Meeting Shelly the goat or Ed the sheep in the Animal Encounters barn will help.
5.    Will this spark someone’s curiosity? There’s no way you can learn everything there is to know about a particular topic in one hour-long program. And we’re okay with that. However, history is chock-full of interesting tidbits, and I try to include just enough of them to spark your curiosity. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll go home and want to learn more on your own. And that, after all, is the most powerful kind of learning there is.

Sarah Morin - Youth Manager

So it’s the time of year I love and dread the most in my job: picking new youth volunteers. As Youth Experience Manager, aka the Kid Wrangler, I am in charge of 100 volunteers, ages 10-18. (Secret: I have the best job at Conner Prairie. Kids are funnier than adults. Adults never ask you how long it takes to microwave their socks.) 

So the deadline has passed, and now I’m sitting with over 70 applications in my lap, trying to decide between great kids and even better kids. I’ve come up with a list of The Top 10 Things I Love About the Youth Volunteer Application Process:

1.    Infectious enthusiasm.
2.    10-year-old, 4’8” applicants who tell me, “I’ve wanted to work at Conner Prairie ever since I was little.”
3.    Kids who come to their interview in business suits. Spiffy!
4.    We adults know what interviewers want to hear. Kids by and large tell it like it is. “What would your teachers tell us about you?” They might say very honestly, “That I can’t sit still and I get in trouble for talking too much in class.” If adults gave brutally honest interview answers like this, wouldn’t the business world save a lot of time?
5.    Creativity. For example, this year I asked the applicants to write an essay about starting a restaurant. Their restaurants included everything from time travel to dog waiters. The menus ranged from French dishes in curlicue fonts to theme foods with bad puns (Lord of the Onion Rings).
6.    Meeting kids who really want to help others. 
7.    Kids who haven’t figured out how to shake hands yet. “Hmm, is it my left hand or right hand, and how tightly do I squeeze, and do I stand or sit?” Is this a lost art? Or maybe kids are just stunned that I’m more interested in them than their parents, so I offer my hand to the kid first. After all, I’m not hiring their parents.
8.    Walking kids to and from the interview room. It’s amazing how a kid who gets nervous and clams up sitting across the table from us will suddenly turn into a chatterbug as soon as the interview’s over and the pressure is lifted.
9.   Finding out what kids are into these days.  Literature is not dead – kids still read books.  Books referred to most over my 9 years of interviewing: Little House on the Prairie and Harry Potter.
10.    Diamond-hunting. You hire an adult for the qualities they already possess. You hire a kid for both the talents they have and their potential.Kids are like ore – I love finding the glint of precious stone in each of them, and wondering how a few years of refining at Conner Prairie will reveal the gem within.

And my least favorite part of the application process…. Picking between them!