Parents

What is there to do on fun4ponies?

There are lots of things to do on fun4ponies all aimed at helping children to think about life from a pony’s point of view, have fun and stay safe when they are around real ponies.

Parents, ponies and children

Fun4ponies is free to join and has lots of members from all over the world.  The online pony lessons, pony activities and pony games have been designed to appeal to a wide age and ability range.  It is great when if you are able to learn about ponies with your child and help them with any of the things that they might not understand.

If your child is young, please do supervise them when they are on fun4ponies and help them to get the most out of their experience on the site.

We have some advertising on the site and although we monitor this closely, if your child clicks to go off the fun4ponies site, we cannot guarantee the suitability of other sites for your child.

As well as making our own pony videos we have chosen to show some videos about ponies from ‘youtube’.  The pony videos we have selected have been watched and approved, but we cannot guarantee the suitability of other videos viewed off-site.

We also have the ponytales online pony forum.  We have computer based filtering software to try to eliminate certain rude words and phrases and human, adult, moderators who check posts and private messages.  Please provide the supervision you feel is necessary for your own child to stay safe in this online environment.

There are also some ‘try it for yourself’ experiments within some of the lessons.  The amount of supervision you provide when your child is with a pony will depend on his or her age and experience with ponies.  We suggest that all young children work with a pony only when there is an experienced adult present. 

Helping your child to learn more about ponies

‘Try it for yourself’ is a section within the lessons where children can read about ponies and try out some real pony experiments for themselves.

If you are going to be with your child when they are conducting these ‘Try it for yourself’ experiments with a pony, please help in a way that allows the child to find things out for themselves.  The idea is not for you to tell the child what to expect from the pony or what is likely to happen within a herd of ponies.  The aim of the experiments is that children will be enabled to think about pony behaviour and herd dynamics for themselves.

Your role is to:

Support
Report
Praise
Ask
Reassure

SUPPORT
Support without interfering!  Tasks such as doing up a pony’s girth so that it is safe and secure, moving show jumping poles, laying out groundwork poles or setting out equipment for a pony fun day would all be good ones for adults.

REPORT
Reporting is a well tested technique for encouraging communication.  You (the adult) just say what is happening without making any judgements or suggestions.  It works really well with young children when you want to increase vocabulary or help with sentence construction. 

Eg.
- You’re using that body brush very gently on that pony’s tummy
- Your pony turned her head to look at you when you put your hand under her tummy to get the girth
- Your pony closed her eyes now that you’re being so gentle

PRAISE
The way you praise is important.  It’s great to hear a ‘Well Done’ or ‘That’s Good’ but the most effective way is to praise the behaviour that you like. 
Eg
- I like the way you are being so gentle with that brush on your pony
- You concentrated really hard when you were riding this afternoon
- You did well to stay calm when that pheasant flew out of the hedge on our hack

ASK
When you are phrasing questions, ask in a way that will help the child to observe, think about or work things out for themselves.  Try not to ask questions that have a right or wrong answer – the idea is that children think about things for themselves without worrying about getting an answer wrong.

WHAT do you think that pony is going to do now?

Did you notice WHERE that pony moved to when ………?

I wonder WHAT that pony would do if you ……..?

HOW did you make your pony move her leg like that?

WHY do you think your pony keeps swishing her tail when you do that? 

REASSURE
The idea behind the fun4ponies online pony lessons and the Try-it-for-Yourself tasks and experiments is that children should be allowed to find things out about ponies for themselves.  Some children may be worried about being wrong, not getting things right or looking stupid.  They may have low self esteem or self confidence and need reassurance about what they are doing right.  In the same way that we make the right thing easy for the pony, so we want to make the right things easy for your children!

Learning new pony skills online

To learn new pony skills effectively, the subject matter needs to be available in ‘bite-size’ junks and learning about ponies online is an ideal way for children to think about ponies when they’re at home as well as when they are at a riding stables or lesson barn.

They can complete the free pony quizzes and games.  There are lots to choose from including: pony colours quiz, pony breeds quiz, pony tack quiz, grooming ponies quiz, pony pairs memory game, pony grooming kit drag n drop game, ponies food quiz, famous ponies quiz, and even quizzes made up by existing fun4ponies members.  For the younger children, there are special cartoon ponies which have been drawn for us by well known cartoonist David Mostyn and these can be printed off and coloured in.

Doing a little bit each day is one of the best ways to improve your child’s knowledge of ponies and their pony skills.