Science Sunday: Horse activities

We finally reached Princess’ favorite chapter, and I had a bunch of fun planning some horse activities.

First we read the section in the Land Animals book, and then I pulled out some of my Breyer horses from when I was a kid.

We compared head shapes.  The horse on the left is an Arabian, they have a wedge shaped head with a very refined nose.  By contrast the Thoroughbred on the right has a much broader face.

Then we compared the way the horses carried their tails.  From left to right: Thoroughbred, Thoroughbred, Arabian, Morgan.  If you notice they each carry their tails a different way, and we talked about why they might carry their tails those ways.  Most of the breeds were bred to act and carry themselves a certain way.  A few, like Morgans, are a happy accident with no long breeding history (ha, didn’t mean to link to those posts).  But Thoroughbreds and Arabians have a very long history that is well documented what they were striving for.  Thoroughbreds have even been somewhat subdivided into bred for racing versus long riding.

After we spent a good amount of time studying the models, they got some time to play with them.  If you don’t have models, you can do a quick Google search or find a good library book on horse breeds.

Then I had a brilliant idea, that was actually a perfectly horrid idea.  I had us paint our hands and feet and try to move like horses.  I THOUGHT, this would let them see the prints of us moving like that.

In actuality, they were more obsessed with getting paint on them, than learning about it, so they remembered not a thing from the activity.  When I repeated it without the paint, they got it.

Because I really wanted them to get the different gaits, not because they needed to, but because I was obsessed with horses as a kid, and it’s a point of pride my kids know about this.  I did a YouTube search and found some great videos about the different gaits.

I’ll use as my excuse, Princess’ extreme fondness for horses.  I was really doing this to make her happy, and it had nothing to do with my obsession.

The kids really enjoyed watching them, and from there we watched videos on giraffes and zebras, but that’s a post for another week, you know when we’re actually studying giraffes or zebras…….

Our final activity was going to be measuring how many hands high we are ( a hand is a unit of measurement for measuring a horse, it is 4.2 inches, or the span of a man’s hand when this was standardized).  Horses are measured at their withers, so our equivalent would have been our shoulders.  But, the day after we had our marathon gait lesson, it rained.  Then it rained all the rest of the week.

We needed the rain, so I’m not going to complain.  Too much.

Let’s see what others did this week:

Each week I’m spotlighting a few posts that were shared previously.  Many posts get linked up later in the week and they don’t always get as many clicks as they deserve, so I’m trying to spotlight a few every week.

Frugal Fun 4 Boys shared a fun way to make the size of dinosaurs more real.  I’m going to have remember this for when we get to the dinosaur chapter.

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