Barn News
Horsemanship for Homeschool
Hello everyone! It's been a busy couple of weeks for us. We are working hard to get all the plans together for the show on June 2nd as well as making sure we have things organized for summer camp. By the way, camp is filling up so if you have not signed up yet, be sure to do that soon. See our summer camp page for more details. On top of that we are starting to fill up on June events with birthday party requests and what not. But we are continueing to refine our lesson program and get the Four Shoes ready to launch. Along those same lines Michelle and Lee are working on a curriculum that we plan to use and offer some special classes for homeschoolers starting this fall. Read on for more details.
Did you know that the number of students enrolled in homeschool in North Carolina grew from 21,500 in 1999 to over 64,000 in 2006? That is a 297% increase over just five years! The number of students that homeschool grows every year. This year there are over 7,500 students in Wake and Johnston county alone. There are a lot of advantages and some disadvantages to homeschooling, but Michelle and I both believe that education is the responsibility of the parent and we applaud those parents who decide to take on that responsibility themselves rather than delegate that to the state.
One of the greatest things about homeschooling is that you can have such a diversity of educational experiences. Rather than be contained in a classroom, a homeschool group can go out and learn in a hands-on environment. There are equine education classes taught at high schools in North Carolina, but most of them never see a real horse unless they are fortunate enough to take a field trip. Homeschoolers, on the other hand, are free to take classes wherever they want. This realization is what led Michelle and I to think, "What better place to take an equine science and horsemanship class than at a horse barn?"
Instead of a solitary field trip (if you are lucky) that the public schools get, a homeschool group taking equine science could see and touch real horses every day. Learning would be a perfect balance of lecture and experience. We believe that this has the potential to be a class that the student would literally never forget. As the teaching saying goes, "I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand."
It cannot be a coincidence that we are at this point in our lives. Michelle and I both are college educated with degrees in teaching and we both have a passion for horses and passing that on to other people. We have all the knowledge and resources necessary to do this and do it well and we are so excited about the possibility.
So watch our website for updates as we continue to build our curriculum. We are currently evaluating textbooks and we think we may have found a winner. We plan to have a curriculum finalized by mid-summer and we'll be enrolling students starting in July for Fall classes. Right now we plan on small classes of no more than three or four at a time so we suspect classes will fill up fast. If you have suggestions for the program, please feel free to use our contact form to send those along.
* All statistics taken from the NC Dept. of Administration Division of Non-Public Education website.
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