A First Horse Show: The 2013 PALS Fun Show

The kiddos were THRILLED to ride in their first horse show over the weekend! The program that the girls take their lessons through, PALS, does mostly therapeutic riding, and once a year they hold a big show to celebrate all their clients'--therapeutic and recreational--accomplishments over the past year. Although it's non-competitive, it IS a real show, with an announcer, and judges, and numbers on a placard safety pinned to your back and everything. The kids also spent the couple of lessons before the show practicing show procedures and etiquette--giving verbal commands loudly enough for the judges in the middle of the arena to hear, circling and reversing and backing their horses, lining them up, etc. I don't usually pay too much attention during their lessons, but on the drive to PALS for the show, I did hear Syd behind me nervously repeating to herself, "I need to keep control of my horse, and I need to smile," so I'm pretty sure that was a big part of the prep lessons, too.

They had no trouble remembering that last rule!

One of my many favorite things about PALS is their emphasis on rider safety. Will is mostly free of sidewalkers during lessons, but for the show she had "horse buddies" with her, one to keep a loose hold of the horse's lead rope, and one to walk next to her:

Syd started her lessons young enough that she had THREE sidewalkers once, one to hold the lead rope and one on either side, and they actually had to keep a hand on her when she trotted, but she's a hugely confident rider now, and during both girls' lessons their sidewalkers are mainly helpful now as sort of personal teaching assistants, helping the girls with technique and reminding them of proper form while their instructor maintains the lesson.

Some of the main pieces of therapeutic equipment in the ring are these nifty elevators that will lift a rider up to the level of their horse's back to make mounting easier. The girls have LONGED to ride these elevators, but of course never have, so imagine their glee when they discovered that since there was a mix of therapeutic and recreational riders in every class, it made things nice and even to have everybody mount using the elevators!

Syd waits her turn to mount Cody using the ELEVATOR!!!

 The girls weren't nervous at all to ride in front of judges, an announcer, and an audience. Frankly, I think they had the time of their lives:

After their show, they lined up while the judges came over to congratulate each of them personally, tell them some specific things that they did really well, and give them a ribbon and a trophy and a high five:

Syd, in particular, was almost comically pleased and surprised to have a real live ribbon and trophy just for her:

In the end, I had a couple of VERY happy, VERY proud little riders--

--who LOVED their ribbons and trophies:

I think they may have caught the horseback riding bug BAD now.

Homeschool Biology: Horse Evolution on the Timeline

Our science right now consists of both horse biology and chicken biology--the kids are taking horseback riding lessons, and we have chicks!

It's mostly memory work stuff, these topics, because I still have my eye on starting an in-depth study of human biology later this summer, so the plan is to study classification, evolution, labeling of internal and external parts, life cycle, breeds, and stewardship for both creatures. Because horses and chicks are of special interest to the kids right now, their interest and engagement will aid their learning, while interacting with and caring for the actual creatures add depth and context and increase their capacity for taking in the material. But much of the actual content that they'll be exploring are actually foundational biology concepts that will build their overall knowledge base and enable me to add increasing depth and sophistication to their further studies.

Classification of horses made for a great research project (and how stoked were we when we finally learned what "odd-toed ungulate" means!), labeling is something that the kids work on every day as part of their memory work (their riding instructor also includes this, briefly, into their lessons), horse care is also covered during their lessons and through library books and videos, breed study is mostly still to come, although the kids have written reports about the horse breed that each rides during her lessons, life cycle is still to come (birthing videos on YouTube--yay!), and evolution was studied last week!

Our horse anatomy coloring book has a page on horse evolution, which the kids colored, cut out, and organized chronologically, then we added in a ton more modern horse ancestors using this online, interactive fossil map. I printed each ancestor off, then the kids cut out the images and important information and added each one to its proper place in the chronology:

I read out loud the info about each ancestor, we discussed how each one represented a change, and then it was downstairs to the big basement timeline, with stacks of horse ancestors, a pot of Mod Podge, and two foam paintbrushes.

It tortures me that our basement timeline isn't perfect--there's not enough room for everything (the lack of space in the Modern Age is critical), the layout of the epochs isn't even, and because it's so busy, it's too easy to accidentally place something in the incorrect decade, or even, in the prehistoric era, the incorrect millennium.

I don't know how you would fix that, though, without standardizing the entries beyond what would be fun for the kids. They like giant pictures, and entire coloring pages, and images printed from the internet, and large, messily-handwritten captions.

And so they glued up their links in the evolution of the horse more or less in the correct spots:

You can at least gather some facts from the messy timeline--horses come after the dinosaurs, and begin to overlap, towards this end of their evolution, with the beginnings of our record of human evolution. Much further down towards the present, we also record the horse's extinction in North America, and then its reintroduction.

And THAT leads to some interesting exploration of human history, and geography, and then leads pretty logically to breed study.

But first I think that we're going to watch those horse birthing videos on YouTube.