Learning Through Horses- Books

I've decided to create a series to document how we incorporate horses into (almost) all our learning. I will link all the posts in this series to this resource page on our site. Feel free to visit often as we will update that page frequently (I hope!).

Books

To spare you from spending all day reading this post, I had Emma pick out her 5 favorite horse reference books. I limited my input to the two newest additions. Your welcome. 

Nonfiction

"I like this book because it has 96 horse breeds and it has 'At A Glance' profiles of the horses"

I like this book because it focuses on horses of North America. Some of the breeds are rare or no longer around, but the information is really interesting.

"I like this one because it has a couple of very good breeds like the Morgan and the Missouri Fox Trotting horse."

Emma got this book when we were doing the Pony Club (which is not longer in operation-so sad). 

Emma uses this one most when looking up horse colors. That's what she told me. 

Emma likes this one, "just to look through because it has pretty pictures in the back."

This has horse breeds as well as basic info for taking care of a pony.

Emma likes this one, "because it has a lot of common breeds."

The details in this book seemed to be pretty good, but we have other books that provide more info about each breed. It has great pictures though, so that's why I think she likes it :0)

The photos in this book are stunning and depict the skeletal system, muscular system and other anatomical aspects of the horse. We are not really at a point where we use this book a whole lot yet, but I am excited for when we are ready!

This book was discovered at our local toy store. Lots of great info and pages for Emma to color. We have dabbled off and on with the evolution of the horse and I think this book might give us a bit more motivation to stick with the subject from beginning to end.  

Fiction

Again, to spare you, we are going to share a few of our favorite horse book authors are rather than list our favorite books.

Marguerite Henry: Misty of Chincoteague series is her most well known set of books. We actually own a lot of her books and have loved them all. We are always on the lookout for more of her books to add to our home library. 

Jessie Haas: We discovered Jessie Haas through the American Girl series about Saige. When we researched Jessie Haas (at Emma's request) we discovered that Jessie Haas has a long list of books about horses. We are on a mission to collect as many of her books as we can. 

Janet Muirhead Hill: Mrs. Hill is a Montana native. She wrote the Miranda and Starlight series that Emma and I both really enjoyed. I think this series will be read again once Emma is older. 

Ruth Sanderson: We found Ruth Sanderson through the Horse Diaries Series. Ruth Sanderson illustrated most of them, and Emma fell in love with her illustrations. We have borrowed many non-horse books just because she illustrated them. She has a bunch of books we would love to own, but have not been able to find yet. 

Emma loves to read. A lot. Most of the time she reads fiction books with horses as the main character. She will also read through her nonfiction horse books if she is looking for the answer to some question that has jumped into her brain. 

On top of the books that we own, just about every visit to the library has us coming home with one or more books about horses. I think we've borrowed all that they have, but we keep borrowing them anyway :0)

Emma working on a horse geography sheet using the book Horses!, pictured above. 

If you haven't figure it out yet, we are pretty unstructured in our learning. This approach doesn't work for everyone, but it works for us. We don't have any one way that we do any of our learning, so let me explain a bit about...

A few ways we use books for learning:

Well, to state the obvious, we used horse books to help Emma learn to read. 

We use horse books to spark interest in other areas. For instance this book (which we read at bedtime over many nights)

Sparked an interest in Austria and World War II. 

Reading about the Spanish Riding School

Creating a map of Austria. 

You can't really see it, but on the map printed out from google maps, we also tracked the route the Lipizzaners and their handlers from the Spanish Riding School had to use to escape during WWII. We used math to determine how many miles they had to travel. We also mapped out the route from where the stud farm is to where the riding school is. Again, we used math. 

Anyway, books are really the basis of just about everything we do. Without books we would be lost. 

Which is why I started this series with books!