Pony Tales...

Exciting news in Lifeskills! Our school district was awarded a grant to complete a project-based learning initiative (more on what project-based learning entails here) at a local therapeutic riding stable for which each Lifeskills class has been tasked with a different goal. The two middle school Lifeskills classes will be participating in horsemanship classes at the stable and will be interviewing both staff and Project Work students with the goal of creating a newsletter to share with the community/school district about the riding center and Project Work. To get our feet wet, the riding center staff brought two sweet ponies to our school to introduce students to the basics of horse care and safety. It was a frigid day (we're ready for you, Spring!), but we had an absolute blast meeting the ponies and learning about how to interact with and care for them!

Here we are making introductions...

 

We were split up by class and assigned to Duchess, the spotted pony on the left.

Both students below have participating in programming at Agape, so they were our go-to students for demonstrating the proper way to touch and groom a pony.

The kids did a great job following directions! T., our Agape instructor, did a nice job getting our kids involved.

We spent a lot of time getting to know Duchess, petting and talking to her...

Duchess was so patient with my students...

We had a chance to practice using each of the different grooming tools that T. showed us.

 The next day, we teamed up with our 2nd period peers to reinforce the terminology we learned during our pony visit by playing a fun game of Horse BINGO.

I made the board using Symbostix and Clipart images...

Then we used little bears as markers...My awesome assistant posed questions to the kids about the different terms on the card. 

 And we have a winner!!!

We are so excited to start going out to the horse farm after Spring Break- I can't wait to share more of our adventures in a few short weeks! We're off on Spring Break until April 14...goodbye for now!

HAPPY SPRING BREAK!