For a lot of people, the beginning of the year means two different things. While the beginning of the calendar year is officially January 1, for many of us, September also marks another beginning of the year because that’s when school starts up again. However, the time frame for the camp year is slightly skewed: with camp, September is still the end of the year. September is for tying up loose ends, returning lost-and-found items, re-organizing the copious amount of leftover supplies, as well as the time to reflect on the past summer while it’s still fresh in our minds—to think about what worked, and what we might want to try for next year. This helps us prioritize when we make our giant list of things to do for the fall and upcoming year. But more on that in a minute…
For us, the real start to the new year is October, because that’s when the after-school programs get into full swing, and when we start getting involved in events to stay connected to families during the year. There are a couple of events coming up this month that we’re getting ready for:
October 15 and 16- DIY Fashion Weekend Workshop: Costume Creations
For our weekend workshops this year, we decided to offer the same workshop on the third Saturday and Sunday of each month to better accommodate busy weekend schedules. This month, Casey and Lindsay (two extremely experienced homemade costume makers) will be leading our Costume Creations workshop, where they will be helping girls realize their costume crafting potential! More details about this, and our other upcoming workshops can be found here on our our website.
October 29- Ghouls and Gourds at Brooklyn Botanic Gardens
This is our second year participating Ghouls and Gourds, which is one of Brooklyn’s best family events. Join us for a fun activity, then enjoy performances by musical groups, create masks, try on giant puppets, and conclude the afternoon by marching in the Halloween costume parade!
October is also when we start tackling that giant to-do list that I mentioned before. Most people don’t realize what all needs to happen in order for camp to work successfully, and that running a summer program truly is a year-round endeavor! For example, this month we’ll start nailing down locations for Blue Tree and Curious Jane for 2012, which is a multi-layered and tricky business. Another big task to undertake is the curriculum: going over all our projects, fine-tuning the ones that worked out well this summer, getting rid of the ones that didn’t, and finding new projects to try out to see if we should add them to our collection.
This year we also want to focus on growing our online presence, so we can be a good resource during the year for families that might not be able to join us for an after-school program or for an event. We’ve updated our website some since camp finished, but we plan on giving it another major update for December 1 which will include new dates and location information, new class descriptions for next year, and new photos to go on our slide shows. In the coming year we want more of our girls from camp to contribute to the blog, and we’ll be reaching out to find out who would be interested in doing that. We also have some new media ideas in the works that we’re really excited about! For example, we’ve been dying to do something with video for years, so we’ve made an appointment to have a video producer come in and shoot something for us to do a test run for an online video.
So really, there’s tons of stuff for us to do during our “downtime” during the year, and we haven’t even gotten to winter yet, when registration and hiring our staff gets going! Before we know it, it’ll be summer again. We’ll keep our old camp war board up to remind us of things to come… at least until registration opens and we get to make a new one!
