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Yes animal calls sounds like a great idea. Feel free to email me at jenny@horseboyworld.com to arrange a visit if you are interested...

Thanks for your kind words Chery. So glad you enjoyed it...

Hi Karina, So glad you enjoyed the book. Do you live in the Austin area? If so feel free to contact jenny@horseboyworld.com if you would like to arrange a time to come out?

Hi there, That is a great blog post - thank you so much for writing and getting in touch. Would love to be in contact with you - please email at jenny@horseboyworld.com...

Hi there, So glad to hear you are creating sensory trail. A word of advice in your planning of it. As much as possible make sure you use all natural material and avoid plastics and other synthetic material. So many sensory rooms make the mistake of being all plastic and man-made which somewhat ruins the point. I think the animal calls sound great. In terms of music in general I think that is pretty child specific. Some of the kids we have hear in Texas love salsa and others reggae, some love rock and others can't stand it. Is it possible to just have speakers and vary the music depending on the kid? That way you can have Lion King songs playing for kids who love The Lion King and so forth??

Thanks for getting in touch Scottee. Glad you are enjoying the posts. FYI this is Jenny (Rowan's teacher and main carer). If you are ever in the Austin area of have any other questions feel free to email me - jenny@horseboyworld.com.

Rowan has a long running obsession with Cartoon Network and for almost a year now has involved the characters from his favorite shows in our lives. He has taken on the persona of Rigby, a racoon from regular show, and myself and the volunteers alternate between which characters we play. These characters come with us everywhere and we call them our team. A few weeks ago he discovered a new show called Dexter's Laboratory which features Dexter the science obsessed boy genius and his annoying sister Dee Dee. When he added Dexter and Dee Dee to the team this seemed the perfect time to revisit chemistry. After setting up our own Dexter's Lab (complete with science goggles and a NO Dee Dee Allowed poster) we began to experiment with super absorbent polymer's. Our first experiment involved making 'instant snow' (by adding water to a super absorbent polymer) and once we had made it we covered the trampoline in it and pretended it was real (we don't see a lot of snow in Texas). Whilst we bounced we talked about polymers. Then it was time to learn about the scientific method - making hypotheses based on observations. To do this we placed our super absorbent polymers is water, milk and oil and hypothesized about what would happen to them. Rowan's guess - they would grow bigger in the water than the milk and wouldn't grow at all in the oil. And of course he was absolutely right. And how did we celebrate?  By covering the trampoline with super absorbent polymers again and in Rowan's words 'making them dance.'    

Rowan recently turned 11 which means that he is now in the fifth grade. According to the Texas State Curriculum (which we try and ensure he is as up-to-date with as possible whilst still following his interests and passions) fifth grade is the time when children should be starting to learn about geometric concepts such as angles, congruent shapes, parallel and perpendicular lines etc. Since the summer we have been racking our brains trying to figure out how to teach these abstract concepts to him in a way that is not only meaningful to him but also fun. In Horse Boy Learning we always adhere to two key principles when teaching Rowan (or the other kids we work with) anything new. The first of these is that we always mould what we want to teach a child to their interests and passions and not the other way around. For example we taught Rowan about the Kings & Queens of England through what kind of toilet they used and the Presidents of the United States through the types of pets that they had. Secondly we always allow the child to move whilst they are learning – the technical term for which is kinetic learning. Children on the autism spectrum are often kinetic learners meaning they need to move in order to be able to receive and retain new information. It is not that they are not capable of sitting at a desk – they are – it is just that sitting at a desk takes up all of their brain power meaning that there is nothing left over for them to take in new information. However, if their body is allowed to move then their brain is free to learn. In Horse Boy Learning we have found that kinetic learners can be supported in two different ways. The first is to allow the child themselves to physically move during a lesson. We do this by teaching the children that we work with on the trampoline or whilst they are swimming, walking or running. The second is to place the child on a moving object, such as a horse, swing, rocking chair or even car. The rhythmic movement of the object stills their mind in a way that would not occur if they were asked to sit on a stationary object. We therefore knew that the key to helping Rowan understand geometry lay in these principles of intrinsic motivation and kinetic learning. About a month ago Rowan began to develop an interest in the roads and rivers of East Texas and requested to be driven over the Brazos River (his current favorite river) on a road called the 79/190 (his current favorite road) as many times as he could persuade us too. It didn’t take us long to realize that perhaps the key to geometry lay in this new obsession. As we drove him on the roads he loves we simply began to slip geometry related terms into our conversation. Comments such as ‘oh look the railroad tracks run parallel to the 79’ or ‘hey, now we are going to turn this corner at a 90 degree angle’ or even ‘the railroad bridge on the 79 is not congruent to the one on the 21’ peppered our conversation. True to form it didn’t take long before Rowan was using these terms himself, asking for us to take him on the road that runs parallel to the railroad tracks or for us to spin him in a 360 degree circle. By introducing these terms to him slowly in a pressure free way we allowed him to take on board and really understand the concepts at his own pace.