“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, you more places you will go.”
We believe that reading has the power to change lives!
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Horse Powered Reading® (HPR) is a uniquely tailored whole-brain learning experience that embraces and supports the whole individual. Combining many different learning styles with a hands-on approach, HPR invites each student to explore their own learning with advocacy, creativity, confidence and a growth mindset.
Despite how modern education is designed in a one-size-fits-all model, reading is a very personal and unique journey. Often social-emotional challenges, ADHD, anxiety, depression, and other mental health or learning concerns complicate student learning. HPR can break through those challenges empowering students to learn or reinforce reading and other academic skills. Students are encouraged to make discoveries and experiment with knowledge firsthand, allowing a chance to reflect on what they are experiencing and provide an opportunity to create new patterns of learning in a supported environment.
Using Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association (EAGALA) model of Equine Assisted Learning (EAL) as the foundation, Horse Powered Reading integrates social-emotional learning with academics in a powerful and memorable way.
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Horse Powered Reading®
Students see and experience reading with their entire mind, body and emotions by creating metaphors for the skills involved in reading. Students interact with horses from the ground, while using toys and props to identify obstacles and learn five critical reading skills - phonemic awareness, decoding,
vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.
Horse Powered Math®
Power-up those key math skills with Horse Powered Math.
The goal of Horse Powered Math is to provide math activities grounded
in experiential, real-time learning. We believe in each student's ability
to succeed and hope these activities will help students realize their
potential while working through the various learning barriers.
Equine Escape Rooms
Creatively using decoding, math skills, teamwork, problem-solving strategies and literacy skills to
solve clues that will lead participants on a learning adventure!
Book Club
-coming soon-
NEXT HORSE POWERED READING® ADVENTURE
It's a bring your own book kind of adventure!
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Grab a favourite book to teach one of our ponies to read. We will explore different reading strategy magic to help the ponies learn all about phonemic awareness, decoding, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension!
Tuesdays after school from 4:00-4:45PM
March 21-April 11
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Ages 6-9 | Grades 1-4
Cost | $80
*Session goals may vary depending upon the needs of the individual or group.
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Get Started!
Empowering all learners
Horse Powered Reading + Math® comes in a variety of different shapes and sizes custom tailored to the individual or group needs from individual sessions to group book clubs to school field trips to equine escape rooms injecting fun and excitement into learning!
Why horses?
Horses are natural teachers. They can help us reflect on how we approach relationships, learning and challenges by giving real time feedback. Horses are prey animals, evolved to be extremely sensitive to their environment and reactive to our unconscious body language and cues which offers much insight into what each student is experiencing. Horses also allow for movement in learning, keeping engagement grounded in the moment. Horses are also excellent at providing opportunities to co-regulate when challenges arise giving support and feedback throughout the process.
How do horses teach reading?
HPR helps students externalize their reading difficulties in order to explore or practice new skills and solutions in an emotionally safe space. The horse plays a few roles both accompanying each reader on their journey as a support or becomes the "book" students are connecting with as a metaphor. Seeing what tools are used to connect with the "book" and how that connection is made between client and horse, allows facilitators/teachers to use clean questioning to help students discover the importance of connecting and allows for the exploration of better ways to do that, through the use of the metaphor. Through this process, the horse creates an opportunity for immediate feedback and experiential learning to take place.
Is HPR effective?
Yes! Our research has discovered that it only takes a few key reading skills combined with motivation, self-efficacy/confidence, and persistence, all of which are taught by the horses, to create exponential growth in learning. An added benefit is that HPR appears to continue enhancing reading skills over time as students' improved social-emotional skills interact with academics in school.
We track measurable results using tools such as:
- Reading Assessments such as Informal Reading Inventory word list assessments, graded paragraph assessments and reading assessment tools already being used by school
- Reading Attitude and Self-Perception measures such as Elementary Reading Attitude Survey, Motivations for Reading Questionnaire and The Reader Self-Perception Scale
-Parent + Teacher observations and perceptions of student progress gathered 4-6 months after intervention