Kiddos will set a course for adventure as they head downstream on the Great River. This exhibit celebrates and teaches about the importance of water as habitat, a means of transportation for commerce as well as a sacred resource and lifeline for our communities.
On Oct. 9, 2021, Great River Children’s Museum board members and committee volunteers were wowed with the second round of design schematics for the museum’s core exhibits. At the Great River, museum visitors will hear and read stories about relationships with the river throughout history.
A massive water table flows with ample space for boat races, movement of goods, building locks, dams and more. Humans aren’t the only ones who live along the banks of the Mighty Mississippi, and families can get “deep into the weeds” to learn more about critical habitats and the critters who call the river home. With rapids, beaver dams and a water wheel, rest assured, kiddos will get wet! And there’s so much fun in that!
Great River Children’s Museum would like to thank Barbara and Rollie Anderson for sponsoring this exhibit.
To learn more about sponsorship or corporate partnerships, please contact Executive Director Cassie Miles at Cassie.Miles@greatrivercm.org
Kids will soon have their head in the clouds (hands, feet and whole self, too!).
Higher and higher, kiddos will climb above cityscapes and rivers in Climber to the Clouds, an exhibit sponsored by Coborn Family Foundation.
On Oct. 9, 2021, Great River Children’s Museum board members and committee volunteers were wowed with the second round of design schematics for the museum’s core exhibits.
Climber to the Clouds will be the heart of the museum, awing museum visitors as they enter the spectacular atrium.
Once museum visitors pass through the ticketing area, the museum space opens up to reveal the towering, immersive exhibit.
Scattered throughout Climber are physical play features to scurry over, under and around. Cranks and buttons invite explorers to interact to learn about weather systems and even create their own rain, thunder, wind, and rainbows.
Passersby also will be captivated by the illuminated, three-story, cloud-filled sky visible from outside.
Great River Children’s Museum would like to thank Coborn Family Foundation for sponsoring this exhibit.
To learn more about sponsorship or corporate partnerships, please contact Executive Director Cassie Miles at Cassie.Miles@greatrivercm.org
Sponsorship of river exhibit keeps museum plans flowing
St. CLOUD – Barbara and Rollie Anderson have announced a personal $1 million dollar pledge to Great River Children’s Museum for sponsorship of the “Great River” exhibit.
“We’ve always said family is the most important thing,” Rollie explained. “Great River Children’s Museum will be a welcome addition to Central Minnesota as a space for families to explore, discover and learn together, and we’re proud to be a part of its development.”
The Andersons have a deep history of strengthening families in our region through their work with Early Childhood Family Education, service, community engagement, and history of generosity with Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Minnesota, CentraCare, and Central Minnesota Habitat for Humanity, to name a few.
Sponsorship of the “Great River” exhibit is particularly meaningful. Museum goers will learn about the importance of water as habitat, a means of transportation for commerce as well as a lifeline for communities. For Barbara and Rollie, their family-owned company, Anderson Trucking Service (ATS), played a key role helping the millions of Puerto Rico residents who were devastated following Hurricane Maria in 2017. ATS has been doing business in Puerto Rico since 1995 and helped the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with generators and pumps to save a dam from breaking, the U.S. Coast Guard with providing potable water to residents, and relief agencies with delivery of other cargo, including shower trailers, laundry trailers, traffic lights, generators, fuel, 28,000 telephone and utility poles, 60,000 miles of cable, transformers, bucket trucks, portable cellular towers, and the list goes on.
“We’re honored to deepen the sense of community in our region by sharing our wonderful heritage and history of life along the river with families,” Barbara said. “Great River Children’s Museum will deliver on the importance of children having an opportunity for hands-on learning experiences.”
GRCM currently is in the fund-raising phase of museum development. At the same time, the organization is working with three professional exhibit design firms to finalize core museum exhibits.
The Andersons join the Coborn Family Foundation as the museum’s first two exhibit sponsors.
“We are at an exhilarating point in our fund raising and development,” said Cassie Miles, GRCM executive director. “Each gift brings us one step closer to opening our doors.”
About Great River Children’s Museum
Great River Children’s Museum is an emerging museum that will reside in downtown St. Cloud, thanks to Liberty Bank’s $1.4 million donation of its building.
GRCM’s mission is to shine a bright light on the power of play to spark children’s learning, strengthen families, and build community connections. The museum currently is in a capital campaign to develop a place where every child and their caring adults can create, explore, discover and be inspired. The museum’s Board of Directors is working with experienced museum planners, exhibit designers, and architects to transform its 25,000 square foot space into one that celebrates the rich, natural elements, resources and cultures of Central Minnesota.
GRCM is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization and member of the Association of Children’s Museums
As the museum begins to take shape through the exhibit design process, so too are the programming components of the museum.
Museums are so much more than just the building and the exhibits themselves. Great River Children’s Museum plans on having additional, hands-on learning experiences including field trips and summer camps.
At the beginning of August I was able to run a pilot summer camp program. I named this experiment Camp Beyond, because what I wanted was us to think past what traditional summer camps at museums often look like. I combined three different elements together for the curriculum of Camp Beyond; practicing social emotional learning skills, hands-ons imaginative play, and TableTop Role Playing Games.
What resulted was a week of absolute joy as I watched a group of campers work together through a series of challenges that culminated in overcoming a challenge and a pizza party at the park!
Over the course of the week GRCM hosted 10 Adventurers (campers), they were broken into groups of five and were led through various activities by their Adventure Guides (camp staff). The various activities included building a world narrative together, making a character and costume, building a cardboard fort, and lastly defeating the bad guy plaguing their world.
According to our surveys, the day our adventurers got to create their hero personas was a huge highlight for them. Not only did they create their character, they were given the freedom to use cardboard, glue, fabric, and other materials to make a costume to become that character. To wrap up that day each camper got to use a program which allowed for them to create a 3-D model of their character which then got printed on our 3-D printer.
A key part of Camp Beyond was providing a sense of community and agency among the Adventurers. At the beginning of the week we presented an open door policy, simply stated: If you need to take a moment (or many moments) away from the group you could. There was a space provided with a set of alternative activities that allowed for the camper to take time away if they needed it. This open door policy is a part of a toolkit that allows for each camper to have more agency throughout the programming.
Ultimately, Camp Beyond was received favorably with requests from campers if they can come back and continue to be involved. I certainly can’t thank my adventurers and their adults more than I already have because they took a chance on a new camp at a not yet open museum.
By Heidi L. Everett, PhD GRCM board member and marketing committee chair
What began as a chicken hatchery, eventually morphed into an athletic club, and turned into a bank ultimately will transform into Great River Children’s Museum. Recent initial design schematics hinted at the shape of things to come.
On July 20, 2021, our exhibit designers shared their vision with museum board members and volunteers as well as our construction partner BCI.
Split Rock Studios and Haizlip Studios both have decades experience designing children’s museums, and they spent hours this spring walking the halls of the 25,000-square-foot building generously donated by Liberty Bank in downtown St. Cloud. Team members lifted ceiling tiles, peeked under flooring, marveled at the racquet-ball-court-turned conference room, navigated awkward floor transitions between building additions and utility spaces trying to envision what the future museum visitor experience could be.
As designer Reb Haizlip put it, “It was a strange path – awkward and inefficient.”
So the exhibit design team spent a few months reimagining every inch of the space from top to bottom, side to side, inside and out to reconfigure it and to propose an “amazing communal space where everybody is dialed in. The heart of the museum,” Reb said.
The initial design schematics celebrated the diversity and richness of experiences in Central Minnesota, from the ever-changing marketplace with its unique foods, textiles and spices to the many meandering ways in which kiddos can engage, explore and understand water as a recreational platform, habitat, energy source, sacred element and essential piece of commerce.
Climber to the Clouds – an exhibit proudly sponsored by the Coborn Family Foundation – will be the centerpiece of the museum. This multi-story, interactive climbing structure is forecasted to create a flurry of physical and intellectual activities for thrill seekers, storm chasers, and weather enthusiasts alike with its awe-inspiring heights, colors and sound.
The engineering zone will provide ample space for little ones and their caregivers to harness the wind, shed some light on solar power circuits, build bridges and work with water as an energy source.
Another exhibit will showcase a magical experience of 24-hours in Minnesota and include trees, a tree house, rope bridge, and campsite. This space will play with light and sound transitions between night and day including bird song, loons calling, wind blowing through trees, the crackle of a campfire, and northern lights. The large tent will be ideal for reading books by day and telling stories with shadow puppets as night falls in the exhibit. Stepping stones will invite kiddos to cross the headwaters of the Mississippi, and a canoe will inspire new adventures downstream.
These are just descriptions of the many delightful details soon to follow. In September, we hope to have detailed exhibit designs to share for our core exhibits once the team makes revisions.
In other exciting news, next month Great River Children’s Museum will be announcing our second $1 million exhibit sponsor and details of that exhibit.
If you’d like to join the Coborn Family Foundation and other exhibit sponsors, please contact our Executive Director Cassie Miles at 320-200-4110 extension 101 or cassie.miles@greatrivercm.org to learn which exhibits are still available.
If your organization is interested in becoming a corporate sponsor of Great River Children’s Museum in a different capacity, please connect with Cassie as well to discuss options. Finally, to learn more about the process of exhibit design up until now, read our blog Ready, Set … Exhibits.
Donation will help open doors to the extraordinary power of play
St. CLOUD – On June 30, 2021, the Coborn Family Foundation announced a $1 million dollar pledge to Great River Children’s Museum for exhibit sponsorship to commemorate the company’s 100-year anniversary celebration.
“We’re pleased to support Great River Children’s Museum, where families can come together and be strengthened as they experience the joy of play together,” said Emily Coborn, president of the Coborn Family Foundation and vice president of operations for Coborn’s, Inc’s eastern region. “We are thankful to the Central Minnesota community for the 100 years of support it has provided to Coborn’s, Inc., and we are pleased to give back to Central Minnesota families through this gift,” she said.
Great River Children’s Museum (GRCM) currently is in the fund-raising phase of museum development. At the same time, the organization is working with three exhibit companies to finalize core museum exhibits. Coborn’s will be the sponsor of one of these exhibits.
“We are grateful for the shared vision of our community partners, who know Great River Children’s Museum will serve as a life source to strengthen families, build community connections, and increase the value of our local economies,” said Cassie Miles, GRCM executive director. “This gift is incredibly energizing as we continue to work to open our doors in Central Minnesota,”
About Coborn’s, Inc. St. Cloud, Minn.-based Coborn’s, Inc. is a 100-year-old employee-owned grocery retailer with nearly 9,300 employees and 59 grocery stores across Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin under the Coborn’s, Cash Wise Foods, Marketplace Foods and Hornbacher’s banners. Coborn’s, Inc. also owns liquor and pharmacy locations. To support its 130 various retail business units, Coborn’s, Inc. operates its own central bakery, dry cleaning facility and grocery distribution center. In 2021, Coborn’s, Inc. was recognized by the Shelby Report Midwest as their Retailer of the Year.
About Great River Children’s Museum Great River Children’s Museum is an emerging museum that will reside in downtown St. Cloud, thanks to Liberty Bank’s $1.4 million donation of its building.
GRCM’s mission is to Open Worlds through the extraordinary power of play. The museum currently is in a capital campaign to develop a place where every child and their caring adults can create, explore, discover and be inspired. The museum’s Board of Directors is working with experienced museum planners, exhibit designers, and architects to transform its 25,000 square foot space into one that celebrates the rich, natural elements, resources and cultures of Central Minnesota.
GRCM is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization and member of the Association of Children’s Museums
As a District 742 ECFE parent educator, some of my work is with parents and children one to one. A mom of a 20-month-old toddler was delighted that we could have one of our weekly meetings at the Curious George exhibit in the GRCM preview space. The mom had seen something on Facebook about the museum but wasn’t sure about trying it out. She mentioned that as a first-time mom she wanted to know more about what was available to her and her toddler in the community.
We met at the museum during an evening time slot, convenient in mom’s work schedule with Grandma and Grandpa coming along. It was amazing! The little one was all about discovery! He easily found the toddler friendly parts of each exhibit: soft furry friends in their habitats, fruits and veggies to put in and take out of baskets, coloring with Grandma, opening little doors to find George and his friends, and turning the big wheels to help George wash the windows. The adults’ eyes were sparkling as they looked around at all the possibilities for play and tried out many activities themselves. The whole family was especially intrigued with the conveyor belt and blocks, planning together to keep the blocks moving. They loved seeing the toddler figure out that he could reach high enough to put the block in at the top of the last ramp, watch it go down, then pick it up and carry it right back and do it again!
What this family enjoyed the most was that they all had fun playing together! They are looking forward to more opportunities with the Great River Children’s Museum. As an educator and a grandparent, I am excited about the future of the children’s museum. It will be a special place for community groups and families to move, play and learn! Thank you GRCM for envisioning and creating this fabulous resource for our community.
Martina Juvera-Paul – SCSU Lindgren Childcare Center Managing Director
We were fortunate to have our Lindgren Early Learning Center children and families visit Great River Children’s Museum’s preview space for both the Storyland and Curious George exhibits. The children were thrilled to share in a special day date with their caregiver. Our families only had great things to say about GRCM! The preview space promotes families and children to connect in meaningful ways, through quality focused time & without household distractions. A couple of parents shared how they loved having time away from home with their child, where it’s so easy to get sucked into competing demands.
GRCM’s preview space is set-up for children to freely explore and use their imaginations with age appropriate, high-interest materials. Play is powerful and critical for early childhood development. This space fosters learning through a wide variety of activities that promote critical thinking and problem solving skills. Our children and families especially loved the features from the Curious George exhibit that promoted teamwork and collaboration, such as the construction site and sidewalk produce stand. Communication, persistence, creativity and curiosity are other important skills that the exhibit features are intentionally geared to foster.
We are eager to see how GRCM evolves and grows. What a gift for Central Minnesota to have a space especially crafted for children and their families to explore together in a rich, educational environment that nurtures connection. We are so excited for this beautiful project and permanent fixture in our community!
Photos courtesy of Martina Juvera-Paul and the Lindgren Childcare Center group.
Tomoko Rebeck – District 742 ECFE Educator
Every single family in my ECFE classes had a fantastic time at the Curious George exhibit! They enjoyed the exhibit so much because it was engaging and provided a special play opportunity that they don’t get to experience at home nor classrooms.
I am excited about the future children’s museum because GRCM has a lot to offer! My ECFE families loved having the children’s museum in town instead of driving a long distance with young children. I strongly believe that GRCM will support Central Minnesota children and families by offering what they need to enhance their relationships and bring them all together as a community through play and exploration! I just wanted to thank GRCM for having our ECFE classes at the Curious George exhibit. All my families had a fantastic time! What a great way to spend a parent-child time! I also thought it was a great way to raise awareness of GRCM and hopefully tie in to the fundraising somehow.
SCSU Students Support Great River Children’s Museum’s Curious George Exhibit by Creating Language and Literacy Extension Activities
By Janet Tilstra, Associate Professor, Communication Sciences & Disorders, St Cloud State University
It’s been an exciting spring semester! Students studying language development and disorders worked with Great River Children’s Museum (GRCM) to create activity packets to extend the children’s museum’s traveling Curious George exhibit.
This project is a model of community engagement, where SCSU students partner with a community organization to apply their newly acquired knowledge and serve a community need. The project involved several steps threaded throughout the semester:
Step one: Meet our community partner. Cassie Miles, Great River Children’s Museum’s Executive Director, visited our class Zoom room in early February to talk about the children’s museum and the Curious George traveling exhibit on loan from the Minnesota Children’s Museum. She shared her vision for the project and other activity examples from other GRCM activities.
Step two: Develop language/literacy activity modules. For their assignment, students were asked to develop an extension activity for the Curious George exhibit focusing on one specific area of language development. Activities were designed to be fun, build language and literacy skills, use the Curious George theme, and be appropriate for 2- to 6-year-olds.
Students were asked to keep materials simple and culturally sensitive to match a wide range of families and care settings.
Project topics included:
Vocabulary building (e.g. nouns, concept words, action words);
Social/pragmatic use of language (e.g. labeling emotions, taking turns);
Language structure (e.g. past, present, future tense or singular vs. plural words);
Language letters and sounds (e.g. rhyming words, counting syllables, matching letters/sounds)
Narrative language structure (e.g. stories include characters, setting, problem, actions, ending).
Step three: Pitch ideas to the community partner. Cassie returned to our Zoom classroom mid-March to hear students pitches and see activity demonstrations. There were many excellent ideas. From all the pitches, three group’s ideas were selected to be refined and used in Great River Children’s Museum’s preview space and shared online.
Step four: Refine the ideas to match needs of the community partner. In April, the selected groups refined their ideas into deliverable instructions and materials for Curious George extension activities. Other students created instructional videos of how to do each activity. The rest of the class designed a caregiver handout with ideas for promoting children’s language and literacy in everyday life.
Step five: On-campus scholarly presentations. In late April, all student groups presented as part of SCSU Husky Showcase, an annual event that celebrates University and community research, creative works and scholarship across all disciplines at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Our students presented as examples of community engagement and applied learning.
Step six: Visiting the Curious George exhibit! A final highlight to our semester will be visiting the exhibit in person. It will be exciting to see the full scale of the exhibit and how our classroom contributions support the children’s museum.
Thank you Cassie Miles & Great River Children’s Museum for partnering!
Great River Children’s Museum is excited to welcome its newest hire, Kylie Conover!
Kylie will be instrumental in helping us fulfill our mission of Opening Worlds as the Program and Outreach Manager.
This is a key position as Great River Children’s Museum continues to raise funds for our 25,000-square-foot renovation and to engage with the community and get everyone excited about a children’s museum in Central Minnesota.
We were able to hire Kylie thanks to Legacy Funds from the Minnesota Humanities Center and the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund that was created with the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.
For the last few weeks, Kylie has been getting acquainted with Board members and volunteers of Great River Children’s Museum and has been having meetings with organizations that serve the families of the greater St. Cloud area. She believes that museums are for everyone and works hard to ensure that the programming she develops is accessible to as many folks as possible.
In normal circumstances, Kylie would be knee deep in crafting materials and excitedly sharing information about what a comet is made up of or looking at the details of the inside of a flower, but the COVID pandemic is forcing all of us to approach things a little differently.
She is looking forward to when the museum will be able to do more in-person activities and programming.
“I am so pleased to be joining Great River Children’s Museum at the very beginning,” Kylie said. “It allows me to ensure that the programs that I am creating for the museum are not only fun and educational but also relevant to the people of St. Cloud and all of Central Minnesota.”
Kylie hails from Reno, Nevada but she is no stranger to the Midwest.
She attended the University of South Dakota where she obtained her Master’s Degree in history with a certificate in museum and archival studies. She is an AmeriCorps VISTA alumni where she was a volunteer outreach coordinator for a small nonprofit in Reno.
Kylie brings with her extensive knowledge of the inner workings of a museum. She worked a year and a half at a hands-on science center as a museum educator, creating programming and demonstrations that appealed to all of the visitors.
The move to Minnesota is a return home for her husband who is from Minneapolis. When Kylie is not working she is an avid runner and explorer of the outdoors with her border collie, Aspen.
By: David Mohs GRCM Facilities Committee co-chair Exhibits Committee member
On a daily basis for over two years, I have and continue to provide behind-the-scenes volunteer support to the emerging Great River Children’s Museum. My information technology background within a secondary education environment was a natural fit for the museum’s interim networking, computing, audio-visual, and security needs.
Though the pandemic has hampered in-person activities, persistent planning for the museum’s launch continues. Given that Abraham Lincoln said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe,” imagine how many hours of preparation are required to convert a 25,000-square-foot, 100-room banking facility into a bustling children’s museum. Upon opening its doors, Great River Children’s Museum will open worlds of exploration, discovery and creativity in Downtown Saint Cloud.
In the meantime, while we at Great River Children’s Museum figuratively sharpen our axe, Minnesota Children’s Museum in Saint Paul has collaborated with us to bring a second small traveling exhibit to the future home of Great River Children’s Museum.
On a recent winter morning, Curious George™ swung out of a freight truck and into the museum’s preview space. Tugged behind him was a bit of countryside. He proceeded to set up an apartment within and is actively constructing a small city. Perhaps, if we have enough bananas, Curious George and his crew will restore our building to its original 16-foot ceiling height! Stay tuned to our Facebook page for pictures.
Like our first traveling exhibit, Storyland, this exhibit will be available for a limited time to limited audiences given pandemic conditions. We were able to welcome 40 small groups through Storyland. Our hope is to invite more than 100 small groups for Curious George.
Our museum team will be scheduling reservations with educational partners and childcare providers first because of their already established “pandemic bubbles.” Then, we will invite individual families to reserve time with the exhibit.
Between guests, the space will be disinfected. Our volunteers will be working hard.
Further details will be announced on our website, via our Facebook page and through our e-newsletter. You can sign up to receive the e-newsletter here.
Rest assured, Curious George’s presence in Saint Cloud will not interfere with his television stardom on tpt and other PBS Kids affiliates.
Curious George and related characters, created by Margret and H. A. Rey, are copyrighted and trademarked by Houghton Mifflin Company and used under license. Licensed by Universal Studios Licensing LLP. All rights reserved.
