Horsing Around!

Student learn horsemanship in Multiple Choices.

    It is a beautiful fall afternoon, and retired farmer and cattleman, Dale Biehl, and four middle school students are busy getting Babe, an American Quarter Horse, and Strawberry, a Pony of America, tacked up and ready to go. The kids have been taking riding lessons as part of the Middle School’s Multiple Choice program. Multiple Choices is funded by a Century 21 grant that was issued to the school two years ago. The class is taught twice each evening, Monday through Thursday during the Month of September and then again for three sessions daily for a week during summer school. There are four or five students in each session.
    

Many of the students involved in the horsemanship classes have never before had the opportunity to ride a horse, some have ridden a couple of times before, and a few even have horses of their own, but want to become better horsemen. One of the concepts that Is taught in the class is that there is more to becoming a horseman than just sitting on a horse’s back and moving around a circle. Before the kids even touch the horses they are required to learn the major parts of the horse and pass a test over the parts. When that is complete, it is time to learn how to handle a horse when you are on the ground, there are lessons on safety, how a horse might react in various situations, and lessons on grooming the horse in preparation for saddling.

    Everyone’s first few rides are bareback so that the students can learn to feel the movement of the horse, and acquire the balance to ride well. It is also at this time that the students do some exercises that help them to gain confidence in themselves as well as the horse they are riding and learn the appropriate posture and placement of their feet and legs. By the third session the kids are ready to try to sit a saddle, but even that comes with another set of lessons. You can’s sit in a saddle, if you don’t first learn how to put it on. Walking and trotting is generally the extent of what a beginner learns in one week of lessons. However, there are some students who sign up for the class multiple times and are eventually ready to try a nice easy lope around the pen.

   As you stand back and watch the group in the pen, you begin to see some other lessons and benefits that the students don’t even realize they are getting. You notice the respect that the students show toward Dale and the horses. You see the confidence with which a developmentally disabled young student teaches the novice student of above average IQ how to get the bridle on or how to make the horse respond to your queues. You hear the laughter and giggles as kids who have no other reason to be together, trot side by side around the arena. When you are on horseback, grade, gender, or ethnicity seem to be forgotten. It is just fun.

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