Miss Chris from the barn (I ride her horse Vanna) asked me last week if I could do her a favor and teach a student of hers riding Vanna. Jake is a young teenager, autistic, and gets very frustrated with Vanna. He loves her to pieces but Vanna can be VERY stubborn and just won't move or just moves the direction and the pace she wants. So Chris asked me if I would teach Jake some tricks.

And today it was Jake's riding lesson and I had a blast teaching horseback riding again!!



Jake is a very good listener and all I should pay attention to is that he does not start crying because of frustration. So I told him upfront that I am getting frustrated with Vanna, too, and that he should not take it personal. She's a tough cookie to ride because she is not a well-trained horse.

So in the lesson we focused on get Vanna going, to really work her mind in doing a lot of excercises like figure eights, little circles, big circles, change in pace, change in directions....I set up little orange cones so that Jake focuses on walk-trot transitions from one cone to the other to really 'control' the pony. He did not really get this part, Vanna started to trot in between two cones but that was fine. To deal with a student you don't know what to teach plus having a student with special needs is different than to have your normal students that you see each week.

But Jake did fabulous and he even cantered Miss Vanna 3 times! She was obvously later in the lesson in the mood of cooperating with us a little more!

Later from Chris I heard that Jake and his Mom Barb liked the lesson and I felt great, too!