I always enjoy educational activities. You can make them fun, and every rider needs to be a well-rounded horseman.
You can talk about horse behavior and psychology: herd behavior, pecking order, horse's homing instict, the fight-or-flight instinct, punishment and reward, classical and operant conditioning, how a prey animal's thinking differs from a predator's (such as a human), etc. Then have them watch horses turned out in a pasture to see how they interact. Identify the dominant horse in the field. See if they can put the horses in order by dominance. Discuss how to safetly introduce a new horse to the herd. Teach a horse a new trick using reward and shaping of behavior. Remind riders that there are no bad horses- only bad riders! And any time you ride a horse, you are training it!
Teach basic health care & first aid. How to clean a wound, wrap a leg, recognize colic and illness symptoms, take vital signs, and recognize lameness. Put together a first aid kit. Go over red flags that indicate when to call a vet. Talk about routine vaccinations, teeth floating, and hoof care that horses need. Talk about nutrition and show different types of feed and supplements being fed at your barn.
Teach them how to lunge a horse, and let them take turns trying (only if you have a confined area like a round pen and a saintly horse to work with).
Discuss conformation. Ask them to cut picture of horses out of magazines, and go over conformational features of each horse.
Research horse abuse and find out about local horse rescues operating in your area. Organize a fundraiser for the rescue. Raise awareness for what constitutes abuse/neglect.
Ask your campers to research horse breeds and decide which breed of horse would best suit them. If you have internet access, this is easy. Otherwise, bring in books about horse breeds. You can have them paint a picture of their ideal horse once they've chosen a breed.
Make up a "Jeopardy" game with questions in horse-related categories such as: horse breeds, riding facts, health care, barn chores, things you would have known had you been paying attention in your lesson yesterday, and parts of the horse.
Have the farrier come to shoe one of your horses, and let the campers watch. Most farriers are real colorful characters anyway, so kids usually enjoy this.
Teach them about other disciplines of riding besides gymkhana. Teach them about reining, pleasure, huntseat, showjumping, eventing, dressage, carriage driving, etc. Use videos or pictures to illustrate.
If you have jumps, set us a course of jumps and let the riders pretend to be horses and run around on their own 2 feet jumping them. Have a pretent horse show over the jumps. Sounds stupid, but for some reason kids always love this!
Make up a story about horses. You only make up the first part of the story like, "there was this girl, and she had a horse, and then this happened, so she...." and then pass on the story to the next person. They make up a couple sentences, then the next person has to take over. It can get really silly and fun.
Crafts: Pet rocks (go find rocks around the barn, use glue, fabric, and paint to make them into pets). Paint/draw pictures. Decorate old horseshoes. Sculpt a horse with clay or sculpey. Let them draw on a horse (use paint that's non-toxic and washes off easily- make a zebra- or a mural). Then you get to teach them how to shampoo a horse - LOL!
Horse themed scavenger hunt.
