August 2010 Newsletter

Greetings from Flow Circus

Japanese Kendamas are a Hit!

Impacting YMCA, 4H, and Summer Camps

Fall Tours Scheduled

Greetings from Flow Circus: We love the summer! Most people love it because it means vacations, BBQs, fireworks, family, and the beach. It means slowing down. For us, it means the opposite. We go non-stop from the first week of June until about the 3rd week of August with more days spent on the road than at our house. But we love it because we get the opportunity to share our love of juggling and skill toys with families, encourage kids and adults to develop new skills, and focus attention on the critical role that libraries play in our communities.

Thank you for all of your support which allows us to do what we love.

Playfully yours,

Paul & Dawn

Japanese Kendamas are a Hit! Paul has been busy this summer entertaining families from Alabama to Connecticut with his antics. His 2010 Summer Reading Program performance encourages kids (and adults!) to learn new skills so that they can Make a Splash and get recognized in a positive way. In this year's performance, Paul reminisces about a childhood summer that gets off to a somewhat nefarious start. In the end, he spends that summer going to the library to learn about juggling, magic, and other skill toys. To recognize his new talents, his grandmother brings him a gift from her travels abroad - a Japanese kendama (for a more detailed description of the show click here).

We want kids to remember the message that they can Make a Splash in all sorts of ways so we decided to give each library we visit this summer a kendama for their collection. We are excited to learn that the kendamas are getting lots of use by kids and staff! Here are just a few comments that we have heard from librarians:

• The kendama gets used hard every day and one of our students got themselves a Chinese yo-yo. You are truly inspiring to these kids; keep up the outstanding work!

• The kendama has given us hours upon hours of fun!  I think the city is going to start docking our pay for all the hours we've spent honing our kendama skills... We had a great time with you guys, and kids are STILL talking about the performance.

• We have had way too much fun with the kendama. It is extremely difficult to put it down

If we visited your library this summer, we hope you too are having fun with the kendama. Feel free to post updates about your kendama (photos of your kids using it, the records for your library, etc) to our Facebook page. For further inspiration, watch this video which has a wide range of competition tricks and their names. Maybe your library could have a kendama "trick of the week." Whether you have a kendama or not, remember you that can find make-your-own kendama instructions at playfundama.com.

We have a few more weeks of library shows left this month, so be sure to check back next month to see our end-of-summer highlights video. In the meantime, you can find photos from our AL, NY, PA, & NJ 2010 tours in our photo gallery.

We can't wait to use skill toys from around the world like the kendama to develop programs for next summer's theme, One World, Many Stories.

Impacting YMCA, 4H, and Summer Camps: In addition to performing at libraries this summer, Flow Circus worked with summer camp programs in a variety of ways.

• Staff Trainings - The first weekend in June, we spent the day with 200 summer camp staff from the Peninsula YMCA in Hampton, VA. Paul kicked off the day with a performance and then we conducted several sessions teaching balloon twisting, juggling, and skill toys for the 80 returning staff. Our sessions emphasized themes such as leadership and team work while providing skills that camp staff could use with campers all summer long.


• One-Day Visits: Flow Circus returned to Avery County 4H to participate in the Mountain Adventure Day Program and also visited the Henderson County Public School Summer Camp Program. During these visits, we worked directly with campers. The day visits consisted of a performance followed by hands-on workshops for groups of about 20 campers. We were impressed by how many jugglers we had by the end of our hour long workshops. We also showed them how to make their own juggling balls using simple items such as balloons and bird seed so they can keep on juggling!


• Week-Long Specialty Camp: For the 8th summer in a row, Flow Circus returned to Cary Academy to offer a 5 day Juggling, Magic, and Balloon Sculpting camp. Our camps were full this summer......full of energy, playfulness, and skill (and full in terms of number of campers too!) We look forward to returning again next summer to teach the Beginner and Advanced camps. Below are some comments from parents of our campers:

My son had a blast in your camp! He's been in summer camps for about five years now, and by FAR this was his favorite camp.

My daughter had a great time - one of the most fun camps she's ever been to. You guys have great enthusiasm and make it a lot of fun - she really enjoyed it.

To see photos of campers in action, visit our photo gallery.

Fall Tours Scheduled: We are already gearing up for Fall school and library tours. Below are the tours we currently have scheduled, but we are still in the process of scheduling additional ones. Feel free to contact us if you would like Flow Circus to visit your area.

• September 21-24: Columbia, SC area


• Mid-October (dates TBD): Fairfax County, VA


• November 1-5: Northeast Tour (NY, NJ, PA)

To book a Flow Circus performance/workshop or schedule a tour in your region, contact Dawn at dawn@flowcircus.com or (919) 604-3462.

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