Young children love animals and are often fascinated by horses. Horses are a great theme for learning about the letter H. Gross motor, fine motor and language skills can all be included as well as exploring concepts across the curriculum in reading, math and science. Interested in learning more about theme teaching? You can learn more about theme teaching here in Preschool School Lesson Planning.
All great lesson plans begin with great books. While increasing reading readiness, quality children’s books about horses will also build their vocabulary and science knowledge base. It’s important to look for both fiction and non-fiction children’s books when exploring any theme.
Here are seven favorite horse themed books for preschoolers and kindergarteners.
In The Wild Little Horse by Rita Gray and Ashley Wolfe, Little Horse goes on an adventure but Papa Horse and Mama Mare are keeping an eye on him too.
In My Pony, by Susan Jetters, a little girl dreams of owning a pony. The pictures in this kid-favorite are just exquisite.
Fritz and the Beautiful Horses by award winning children’s author, Jan Brett is a wonderful story. Fritz, a pony usually excluded from the group of beautiful horses within the walled city, becomes a hero when he rescues the children of the city.
Kids love Bob’s Great Escape, an I Can Read! book by Dandi Daley Mackall and Claudia Wolf.
The Horse in Harry’s Room by Syd Hoff is a fun level one reader.
For non-fictions, Horses and Ponies by G. Gaudenzi and Tim Haggerty, an Usborne Reader is a great choice as well as Everything Horse: What Kids Really Want to Know about Horses by Marty Crisp.
It’s fun to horse around with gross motor games.
Young children need plenty of chances to be on the move. You offer gross motor movement, while building vocabulary and teaching kids more about horses by playing walk, trot, canter and gallop.
Horses are measured by hands.
Introduce math and measuring horse style. Horses are measured by hands. Measure each child by hands and make a graph of how many hands tall each child and teacher is.
Practice fine motor skills by making fences.
Here’s something really cool about using a horse theme for letter H. You can have students create the capital letter H, whether out pipe cleaners or craft sticks. Now, if you put each child’s letter H in row, on a bulletin board for example, you’ve create a fence for the horses too.
Need horse coloring pages?
Maybe before you put up your fence, you’d like to have some art time and let kids paint or color horses for fun a bulletin board. You can find several fun horse coloring pages here to you started.
Visiting a farm?
Ask if you can bring along some homemade horse treats. Cook up some math and science with these easy homemade horse treat recipes. Many of these horse treat recipes sound pretty kid friendly too.
