How to Teach a Child a Dressage Test

It's hard to get a child excited about a dressage test. Or about dressage at all when there are other things, such as jumping, that she could be doing instead of dressage.

For Lily's first horse trials (I think the coming one will be her third) I really had trouble getting her attention about the importance of dressage, let alone the concepts involved. Now that Lily is older and understands that her place in dressage will determine where she stands in the competition, she's practicing her test every night. Thank goodness I'm not a good housekeeper or I might have thrown away the things essential for this practice.

If you want to teach your child a dressage test, I suggest you do it in three stages.

1. Indoors using a Breyer horse and a shoe-box lid;
2. Outdoors doing the test on her own two feet while you judge; and,
3. Finally, on horseback.

Here's what you need for part one:

Take a shoe-box lid, cut out an entrance at "A" and use a marker to put in the other letters. Here's an aerial view of our shoe-box dressage ring.

Then, get a noted Breyer stablemates "dressage horse" (we're using Seabiscuit because we couldn't find Pumpkin -- they're not in frame and don't bend in the corners but Buddy probably isn't going to either) and start riding the test.
Here's Seabiscuit from an aerial view and entering at "A."

For the next step Lily does the test on foot in the pasture, where we've set up ceramic tile blocks (because we had some) that we've painted the dressage letters on. Unfortunately, we don't have any kind of arena wall. Paul got smart and embedded small concrete blobs in the ground at the four corners of the arena (small size -- no room) so that we don't have to re-measure every time.

We have used spray paint (the kind made for marking lines on the ground) to mark the arena boundaries in the past, but have gotten either too cheap or too lazy.

It's tempting to throw the shoe-box lid away after it's all over, but keep it. It's a handy thing. And Seabiscuit's getting pretty good at dressage, too.

Comments

[photogchic]

Great idea Anne-Way to make learning fun. Now can you fly to Portland and teach me?:-) Good to know Seabiscuit is so versatile. What was his score if I might ask?