Not that anyone cares, but I have finished the prompt for the notebooks of the horrible children. Go me. It's below the cut.
For your competitive trail notebook, your entries should look something like this:
Weather (How was it? Hot, humid, cool, sunny, overcast, thunderstorms, whatever. Tell me about the weather.)
Who all was there, with what horses they rode
Where we rode and any riding skills that we worked on (like two-point or changing diagonals or leg yielding or whatever)
Educational topic of the day, with all the details you can remember.
OPTIONAL: You can also add anything else interesting that happened, if anything else interesting happened.
You should write at least half a page in the notebook for every day that we go out. More is OK but try for at least half a page and include all the stuff listed above except you can skip the optional interesting thing part if it was a day without any interesting things. (A whole summer of "no interesting things" will get a frowny face grade. Try to find some interesting things.)
It was hot and humid, over eighty degrees. At least we didn't get rained on. The deer flies were annoying.
Everybody was here today, so me on Nick, Tessa on Roxy, and Makayla on Jessie.
Tessa led the exercises today. We went down the hollow and up the hill twice. Each time we got to the buckwheat field we went around it twice at the trot. Nobody has won the dollar marching contest yet but they keep working at it.
Today we talked about trotting. The trot is a two-beat gait with suspension. Suspension means 'in the air'. The legs work in diagonal pairs at the trot, so like left hind and right front work together and also right hind with left front work together. When you trot in the ring, you are supposed to post UP when the outside shoulder comes forward. "Rise and Fall with the outside wall" is the rhyme. For the competitive ride, you should change diagonals regularly so that you and your horse stay balanced and do not get tired on one side.
We saw the big groundhog that Matt hasn't managed to shoot yet. Nick spooked. She does that.
