We made horse treats for our summer camp Feeding and Nutrition lesson year after year – one of our students’ favorite lessons!
The file contains a page with recipes for horsey cookies and muffins, and a versatile little quiz with related Red Level questions and answers.
Lots of options for both the treats and quiz:
- It's possible to bake treats without a full kitchen - we used a food processor and a toaster oven on our barn porch for the first six years of camp! Just use sensible safety precautions.
- Recipe ingredients are pretty standard, and can be adapted to whatever you have on hand (e.g. use applesauce for the water); measurements are approximate and variable, so adjust those to get the consistency you want.
- You can prep ingredients ahead of time as required, but let each student take turns measuring and stirring in ingredients as you talk about horsey nutrition.
- If horse cookies are not fed to horses as soon as they're cooled, make sure to store them appropriately to prevent spoilage.
- Or just make the treats yourself, give students a copy of the recipe, and use with Red HorseSense Teaching Guide: What's For Dinner?
- Red Level mini-quiz can be used as an oral or written quiz, or just as points of discussion.
- Adapt the quiz for Rainbow Level students - who technically only need to know safe feeding of treats - according to maturity level.
- Adapt the lesson for Yellow Level by having students identify ingredients as roughage or concentrates and expanding the discussion of feeding rules and nutrition.
