Horse Week

After the completion of our first week of homeschooling with the subject of spiders I offered the boys the chance to decide what we would study next. It was unanimous: Horses! With Kimberly, we eagerly planned a week of barn visits, riding lessons on Jax (Kimberly’s kid-friendly thoroughbred), basic horse anatomy lessons and much more.

We started the week out with a study of H and O (followed later in the week with R, S, and E, repeats from SPIDER week). Jonas learned the sounds of the letters and offered possibilities of other words that began with those letters. He practiced writing them while Ronan drew pictures on his writing pages and then we left for the library to find some horse books. Among our horse encyclopedias we also found some story books about a horse named Blaze and his adventures with Billy. The Black Stallion also made it home with us as one of teacher mama’s favorite movies from childhood.


Jax obliged us with a lesson on basic horse grooming, anatomy and riding. Very quickly Jonas learned to give Jax a few basic commands with his body in order to steer the horse in the direction he chose. Jonas learned to keep his toes pointed toward the sky, sit up straight, look where he wanted to go and hold his ice cream cones upright (hands holding the reigns). With the help of a drawing on poster board done the night before by teacher mama, Jonas and Ronan got a bit of anatomy practice before their visit with Jax so that they were somewhat prepared to point out his muzzle, flanks, hocks, withers, nostrils, mane, tail, knees, neck and other basic body parts. Ronan, of course, made sure to point out where his weenie was hiding.

After our visit with Jax we decided we’d like to visit some other horses as well so with the help of the internet and Kimberly we found two more barns to visit. The first we saw was Natural Horse Savvy, run by Monica Meyette at Eden Farms Stables. Monica is truly invested in the horses she works with and rescues horses from bad situations to train them and the people who deal with them to a better understanding of each other. She showed us a Hanoverian mare who had been stuck in a stall for over a year before Monica rescued her. The mare was doing very well when we saw her but had needed extensive physical therapy after being rescued.

Our visit with Natural Horse Savvy flowed quickly into a short visit at Kimberly’s previous barn where we got to see a variety of horses in a beautiful barn setting.



Back at home the boys built a round pen in the living room out of chairs and cushions and we practiced lunging each other. Jonas drew a very beautiful picture of Roskve, his favorite horse that he calls his (grandma’s first filly born at Landwoven Farm). His math for the week was a series of word problems involving counting grandma’s Icelandic horses and imagining rearranging them according to different pastures at the farm.

Horse week was a spectacular success!