Volunteer Spotlight

		"The field trips VIPs have taken have been just great; I have enjoyed all that I have been fortunate enough to go on. ... What an unexpected bonus for a four-hour stint once a week!" -Liz Ferry, Visitor Services Assistant Visitor Services Assistant Liz Ferry at her work station, summer 2011. Photo by SCA intern Matt Griffing. Courtesy of NPS, Olmsted NHS.
Liz Ferry, Visitor Services Volunteer Meet Visitor Services Assistant Liz Ferry, who has volunteered at Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site since 2003. Liz has held down the Monday morning shift since she arrived here that year, serving as a front-line contact with the public, whether in-person or via the telephone. A Brookline, Massachusetts resident, Liz was introduced to the site by attending one of the Holiday Open Houses held here annually before the site closed in 2005 for a major preservation construction project. When her time became flexible some time after the Open House, she thought volunteering at Fairsted would be an interesting way to spend some time each week. What keeps Liz coming to Fairsted are the passion many visitors have for Frederick Law Olmsted and the satisfaction of working with the site's paid staff that "appreciate(s) my small contribution!" In addition, she has enjoyed field trips to area sites of interest organized periodically for the volunteers. "What an unexpected bonus for a four-hour stint once a week! Loved Adams National Historic Park especially because of the range of history involved and the beauty of the gardens and library." Liz also recalls the thrill of walking across the award-winning Leonard Zakim- Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge in Boston before it opened to vehicular traffic.		She also reports another benefit from volunteering at the site: learning about Olmsted's work around the country outside of his well-known Boston (Emerald Necklace) and New York (Central Park) designs. She further has become more familiar with the National Park Service and has made a point of visiting other NPS sites. She has made several visits to Joshua Tree National Park since 2003 and has been struck by the spring desert flower blooms there. Liz's outside hobbies include cooking as well as being a news junkie and a self-described Italophile. She has made seven trips to Italy over the past 10 years and took Italian lessons for two years with her husband Mike to help make their trips smoother and more meaningful. We look forward to Liz's continued presence, warmth, and enthusiasm as the site prepares for its formal reopening by midyear 2012.
		"...all of my students felt empowered by the knowledge that the boxes that they built were going to be used by other students as part of a learning activity...they thought it was "cool" that their boxes were historical reproductions of an actual museum piece." -Keith Landin, woodshop teacher Keith Landin, a woodshop teacher and a student, both from Woodstock Academy in CT, research a stadia box from the Olmsted collection for use in Fairsted's hands-on educational programming for third-grade students. Photo by SCA intern Matt Griffing. Courtesy of NPS, Olmsted NHS.
Keith Landin's Woodworking Class, Education Mr. Keith Landin, the woodshop teacher at Woodstock Academy in Woodstock, CT, is not your average teacher. Woodstock Academy recognizes the value of community-based efforts in ensuring that the guiding principles of their founders, "to prepare students to play 'a reputable and useful part in the theatre of human life'" are being met. We congratulate Mr. Keith Landin on doing just that by discovering meaningful and effective woodworking projects for the benefit of his students and the larger community alike. The benefits of woodshop class for participating students are becoming increasingly well-known and more widely recognized as having direct practical application to cross-curriculum concepts and understanding. The Boston Globe reports that students in woodworking classes graduate at higher rates and are more likely to pass high school exit exams than their peers, as woodshop combines math, science, and social studies in the development of problem-solving skills. After finding our volunteer opportunity on a woodworking teacher's network blog, Mr. Landin piled his students on a bus to travel up to Brookline, MA to learn about the project they were about to embark upon. Back in CT, Keith also conducted his own research and prepared a slideshow presentation to provide contextual framework for the specifics of this woodshop project. Mr. Landin's students learned new woodworking techniques, such as dovetail joinery and ripping wood, while constructing 10 wooden boxes to be used in Fairsted's signature education program Good Neighbors. Carlos Colon, David Delashmutt, and Ben Hoyt, just three of the ten participating students, reflected on the complex step to step process the class worked through to see this project to a completion. What started as a family past time, or a simple art credit, had transformed into a discovery process of problem solving, application of lessons learned in previous math classes, and the successful start to a real-world product. Click here and read Activity #2 to see how these boxes are used.		Top: A reproduced stadia box made by a woodworking student from Woodstock Academy. Middle: Woodworking students constructing their boxes in the Woodstock Academy woodshop. Bottom: Mr. Landin and his students pose with with their completed boxes. Photos Courtesy of Woodstock Academy.