Off to Join the Circus

Off to Join the Circus

I'm Back! My name is Birdie, and I just finished second grade. When school lets out for the summer, I'm off to join the circus! Okay, I'm really off to circus camp. I went last summer, when I was seven. For ten days, we learned how to do things that I'd never done before. Then at the end of camp, we put on a big show. It was so fun, I came back this year!

Taiko Our first class of the day is taiko- “ great drum" in Japanese. We wheel out thirteen large wooden drums to the center of the marley-that's the type of floor we work on. Almost everything we do takes place on the marley. With two or three kids to a drum, we do a drumroll with the tips of our index fingers, pretending they're drumsticks. Next, one of our teachers hands out the real bachi-the straight wooden sticks used to play taiko drums.

When our teacher gives the command- " Hai! " -we beat our drums in unison. Thirteen big drums with thirty drummers beating on them make a mighty sound. At the end of class, we bow to our teacher. Then it's on to something completely different.

Aerial Silks Aerial means “ in the air, " and during silks class, that's where we spend our time. The silks are pieces of strong black fabric that hang from the ceiling of the gym-about twenty feet high-down to the marley.

Some kids (like me) can climb to the top of the silks. That's fun, but what we're learning to do is not just climb the silks but also hang from them. There are lots of different ways to hang-by our feet, by our arms-but they all involve locking the silk around some part of our bodies. Once the silk is locked, it will hold us safely, whether we're twenty feet or two feet off the ground.