We finally reached Princess’ favorite chapter in our Land Animals Unit, and I had a bunch of fun planning a horse mini-unit. I will tell you right now, some of my planned activities went better than others, but it sure was fun to try these for some hilarious science lessons.
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Horse mini-unit books
As our spine, we used Apologia Land Animals of the Sixth Day to get a general idea.
Then if you want more texts here are a few you could grab:
- Horses by Gail Gibbons
- Horses by Seymour Simon– these first two are tried and true authors that I always recommend if the author has a book on the topic
- Horses on the Farm– this gets a nice book on how most people use horses
- Horses, Horses, Horses– this particular series is a nice series of books for early readers
- This is not a comprehensive list of books, but this gets a good idea of different books for everyone to look and see what your library has. My library had over 100 horse books in the nonfiction section, though many of these include sea horse or others…
Horse mini-unit Activity One: compare horse breeds
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 that way. 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 those bred for racing versus those bred for 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, which 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.
Horse YouTube videos to observe their different gaits
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…….
Measuring ourselves like a horse
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.
So my grand plans of having the kids lay down on the sidewalk and draw out their height on the sidewalk, and then draw out the height of a horse and measure out the various ones as ruined.
We needed the rain, so I’m not going to complain. Too much.
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