August Newsletter

Hi Everyone and welcome to our August newsletter – August already! This year is racing past super quick!

The pic above is Calais, Tess and Secret who live in the school mare’s field. Calais and Tess are hopefully going to be doing some work in the future with SRUC – they can be a little bit sharp for some of our members as they are forward, responsive mares, but they may yet find themselves taken off furlough and fittened up! Secret is an older mare – 24 years old, who we bought 4 years ago, and we have pretty much retired. These ladies will be with us till the end of their days as we don’t sell on or pass on our horses and these three currently live their best lives in the field all day with the rest of the herd. The three of them are very good at keeping the “young upstarts” like Teddy and Bali in their place

PONY STARS So, Pony Stars are proving to be very popular with our younger members! The books and resources are great and really child friendly so we are running two weekly sessions – one on a Monday with Laura (4.30p.m) and one on a Saturday with Liam (10.30a.m) which our under 12 members can book into as they want. The sessions cost £15 per hour and the first session has an initial cost of £25 which buys the book/bag/stickers/badges and other resources which the young member gets to keep. If you’d like to have your younger member attend, then ust let Ali know by emailing lessons@aberdeenridingclub.com or ask at reception when you are next in.

ASSESSMENTS

We can now confirm that we will be running our annual assessments for all riders the last two weeks in September. You don’t need to do anything different for assessments – you will just notice that there is an additional coach taking notes on your standard lesson – so the lesson will carry on as normal, but the following week you can collect your feedback form from reception (or electronically). We try to do assessments every year around summer time, but couldn’t last year due to Covid restrictions. The assessments are primarily so that we can check that everyone is riding in the correct standard of lesson and that our coaches are covering the correct content in the lessons – if you would like to see our assessment gradings then they are available on our website. Each standard is colour coded but the aim is obviously not that you change standard/move up a colour each time – each colour is quite a big jump in standard – its more for you to get feedback on what you need to work on over the next year.

We only assess our group lessons as it is quite a big drain on coach hours as we need two for each session, so if you ride in private lessons only and you would like to be assessed then have a chat with us and we can slot you into a group lesson for the week of the assessments so that you can be assessed.

SURVEY FEEDBACK As most of you will have seen, we have now fed back all the survey responses onto our members Facebook page – we got a great response and were delighted both with the feedback and with the suggestions for additional activities/educational topics. There were quite a few responses requesting small/friendly competitions for our riding school members or the return of the August show, so our members committee have been having a look at that. Unfortunately, there just isnt’ enough time now