Central Kentucky Riding for Hope
Equine Assisted Learning
By Kim Noreikis, CKRH Instructor

During my twelve years of teaching, I often found that my students had trouble making connections when learning new material.  One source of difficulty for me in teaching children from at-risk populations was the fact that their life experiences were very limited.  With so little background knowledge, it was difficult for children to build any type of schema or to form relationships between old learning and new. 

I found that students’ motivation to participate and become part of the new learning greatly increased in a novel situation.  Creating this situation could sometimes be accomplished in the classroom, especially if I could present some real artifacts pertaining to the content.  Literature and videos were also a great way to show students places that we couldn’t actually visit.  In a sense, I would “bring” new learning environments to the students.  Nevertheless, what I would have preferred over bringing the environment to the students was transporting the students to the new learning environment. 

While there is much wonderful literature available and educational videos galore, nothing compares to real experiences…feeling the softness of a horse’s muzzle or smelling the aroma of its grassy breath.  The word “neigh” as written in a book does not do justice to the sound of a real horse’s nicker heard from the inside of the barn.  Direct interaction with rich environments provides the stimulation needed for children to develop the language to help them perform more complex tasks such as problem solving (Greenough, et al, 1993).  Pellino (2004) points out that children who grow up in impoverished environments often miss out on these types of rich experiences:

…poor children do not have the same kind of experiences that children of other social classes do.  The experiences they miss out on are those that could help in the development of skills and academic achievement…The social environment that is present in conditions of poverty affects the development of these children by limiting the way they learn to live in social groups.  Opportunities for intellectual development, such as the development of cognitive skills and thinking patterns, are the result of social interaction…Language is an important tool in the process of learning to think… (taken from the section entitled Challenge:  Lack of Readiness to Learn, ¶ 2 and 3).

Central Kentucky Riding for Hope provides the alternative learning environment where students who struggle in the traditional classroom can come and experience hands-on learning, in authentic situations, with the added bonus of interacting with some very special equine partners in learning. 

New Learning Environments

This program gives our students the opportunity for many rich experiences involving all the senses and building on rich language.  Students’ motivation to learn and participate will be high; working with the horse is the main motivator.  This project is not a fieldtrip.  This is teaching and learning in an alternate environment, an authentic environment where students will not have a chance to be bored, put heads down, or otherwise “check out” during instruction.  Students would commit to learning in our program for an eight-week session, involving one two-hour lesson per session.

The primary purpose of this unit is to integrate reading and writing skills with social skills and problem-solving skills, while at the same time empowering students to seek new learning through rich experiences.  The lesson format will be a sort of “souped up” guided reading lesson, containing the five components of Reading First (Partnership for Reading, 2001):  phonics, phonemic awareness, comprehension, fluency, and most definitely vocabulary, along with choral reading, repeated readings, and reading for a variety of purposes.  Instruction will go beyond the typical guided reading lesson when students participate in some hands-on activities with our miniature horses.  The teacher will model thinking and self-talk throughout, while volunteers and staff work with students to meet the objectives of each particular lesson.  The hands-on portion of the lesson will follow the format of an instructional conversation, followed by segments of teacher modeling, guided practice, then independent practice (under staff supervision).

Independent Practice

Following the hands-on portion of the lesson, students and staff will reconvene for reflection.  This is the opportunity to reinforce social skills and to allow for some higher-order thinking:  putting together all the parts of what we did to come up with something new, as well as evaluating our work for the day and learning how to make suggestions to teammates that will improve everyone’s learning.  The final portion of class will entail the writing component, followed by sharing.  This is another opportunity for students to apply vocabulary and writing conventions, along with boosting self-esteem by having a moment when every member of the team is devoted to focusing on the reader.

Authentic discourse (Cazden, 1988) and instructional conversations will promote the development and use of rich language.  All levels of questioning are vital to instructional conversations.  Lower level questions help establish that students remember previously learned material (knowledge), that they understand previously learned material (comprehension), and that they can use learned information in a new context, such as to solve a problem (application). 

Higher level questions can be used to guide students to break material apart and explain the relationships between parts (analysis), to put parts together to form a new whole (synthesis), and to arrive at a reasoned judgement about a topic or situation based upon a set of criteria (evaluation).  In working with equines, there are many issues of safety and respect that must be worked out in order to achieve maximum cooperation and participation from the animals.  Various levels of questioning will be utilized in learning about and from our equine partners throughout this unit.

Due to the distinct nature of this learning environment, texts that relate to our learning situation will be created by the teacher.  These texts will follow the pattern of the leveled texts used by the students in their reading program, and will be written at the same level on which students are reading at school.  In the spirit of the ‘Language Experience’ approach promoted by Adler (1979), portions of the texts will be generated by students.  Language that is meaningful to students carries more weight in their minds than texts with which they have no prior connections. 

Objectives for lessons will be partly based on what was accomplished in prior lessons.  The overall goal is to increase student comprehension through building language in this rich environment.  Throughout our activities, student’s strengths will be emphasized and teaching will be catered to their various intelligences, including Gardner’s (1999) eighth intelligence, naturalistic intelligence.  Who knows?  Perhaps this experience will ignite the spark that will lead these learners to a career working with animals.

References

Adler, S.  (1979).  Poverty children and their language:  Implications for teaching and treating.  New York:  Grune & Stratton, Inc.

Cazden, C.  (1988).  Classroom discourse:  The language of teaching and learning. Portsmouth, NH:  Heinemann.

Gardner, H.  (1999).  Intelligence reframed:  Multiple intelligence for the 21st century. New York:  Basic Books.

Greenough, W.T., Wallace, C.S., Alcantara, A.A., Anderson, B.J., Hawrylak, N.,Sirevaag, A.M., et al.  (1993).  Development of the brain:  Experience affects the structure of neurons, glia, and blood vessels.  In Anastasiow, N.J. & Harel, S. (Eds.).  At-risk infants: Interventions, families, and research (pp. 173-185).  Baltimore:  Paul H. Brookes Publishing Company.

Partnership for Reading.  (2001).  Put reading first:  The research building blocks for teaching children to read.  [Brochure].  Jessup, MD.:  National Institute for Literacy.

Pellino, K.M.  (2004). The effects of teaching and learning.  Retrieved March 28, 2005 from http://www.teach-nology.com/tutorials/teaching/poverty.