The Littles Western Riding Program is gearing up to kick off in a few weeks.
The program will be hosted at the Humblehorse Ranch near Strathmore.
It helps kids from ages three to eight years old improve riding skills on horses and offers hands-on social skills with the animals.
Becky Skuter, the head riding coach at the ranch says, "From a riding perspective and a hands-on the kids will get a chance to develop a lot of their soft skills."
Skuter called it learning the "language of the horse" to build skills around riding and horse safety.
"If you can speak their language, understand how they speak to one another, how they respect each other, how they talk when they're a little bit uncomfortable when they're mad, they're scared, that filters into the saddle."
According to Skuter, once kids hit nine-years-old, they can go into the Storm Academy.
"As they get older within the Littles program, we start to challenge them more from a technical side of the riding and give them a little bit more independence."
Skuter mentions one rider who participated in the Littles program is now one of her top staff.
Aimee Bailey, the lesson coach for the program, and sister of Skuter says they work at building confidence levels, horse safety, and social skills while having fun while they do it.
"Each child is going to have three people working with them. Each child is going to have a leader assigned to them to lead their horse," says Bailey. "And then they're going to have my sister Becky who is going to be the demonstration and safety coach and they're also going to have myself who is the lessons coach."
Skuter graduated from Olds College in 2003. The two sisters started doing some therapeutic riding classes and Bailey was doing her thesis on equine therapy for her college degree in Child Studies.
Following that the two got into equine therapy.
"I was able to get a grant for that, so we got involved with that with our Humblehorse program and we developed an equine therapy program," added Bailey.
Sessions start on Sept. 14 and will run in four-week increments. You can check out the program schedule here.
