4-H Club explores Horses

Our Explore 4-H club held its second meeting on Sunday, May 15, 2022 at Missy Teeple’s farm with her horses. All members were present — Jessica Teeple, Landon Teeple, Mason Teeple, Olivia Seguin, Melania Olson, Rihanna Morrison, Emily Romyn, Sydney Romyn, Georgia Romyn, Hailey Wilson, Jameson Teeple, and our leaders Krista Olson and Melinda Romyn. We started off the afternoon by answering our roll-call questions which were “name one thing you can do while working with a horse to make this situation safe,” and “have you ever witnessed an unsafe situation when someone was working with a horse?” All the members got a chance to share before Missy went into details about her experience. We started with learning about horse facts, horse terminology, colours and markings on horses as she showed us on one of her horses. Then we moved onto the hands-on part where we learned how to measure horses (measured each other with our hands to try it out), lead a horse, tie safety knots, groom properly, and finally how to saddle a horse to ride it. All of our members had the chance to try each of these tasks as we learned about them on a couple of Missy’s horses whose names were Rocky and Rosco. We did briefly discuss horse shows, rings and what certain ribbons mean, example, red meaning “stay away”/kicker. We went over our horse project assignments to be done at home, and enjoyed some refreshments and snacks together before president Jessica adjourned the meeting. Our next meeting is June 5, 2022 to learn about gardening.