Hippo Therapy

Name

Institution Affiliation

Hypo Therapy

Hippo Therapy: Healing Children with Horses

Personal growth simply means helping the needy. I would like to volunteer as a hippo therapist assistant because I have an experience of seven years. At the same time, it will give me an opportunity to assist other needy people.

What is hippo therapy?

Hippo therapy is the using horses treatment methodic that includes training in physical, occupational, and speech-language purposes. I decided to help via horses right from my time as an elementary school pupil. After realizing that I was an unquiet and average kid who did not enjoy spending time in school, I was advised to attend horse therapy. This changed my life because it transformed me from a hyperactive student into a good one. The treatment was working!

Why hippo therapy?

It started when I was still in high school particularly when my mother told me about a hippo therapy school. I then agreed that it would be a perfect opportunity to help other children who were in need of special care.

Even if I am neither a doctor nor a Kinesiologist I now have a horse riding experience of ten years. To get the best from these beautiful animals, I opted to join a small group of Kinesiologists: tutors, parents and horse instructors. My colleagues used to argue that we are not profit-making teams. Instead, they joked that we are for debt purposes.

My main duty is to give exercises to the children who may choose to use horses to perform them. However, before moving children into therapy, we do some funny and recognition jobs, mostly through games like connect the Dots and Color inside the horseshoe and a diagram showing the parts of a horse. Such activities try to get our children familiarized with the parts of the horse. Our horses are Big Boy, Canciller and Dudú.

Once I realize that the child is ready to work with a horse, I repeat the previous exercises, but this time above the horse. If a child gives us a positive feedback at this stage, it becomes our bright moments. In fact, we celebrate our efforts as successful tutors. This happens especially when they do this task in a quick and comfortable manner.

I always speak about Arturo, a thirteen-year-old boy who was suffering from Down’s syndrome. His parents had already been to almost a hundred different types of treatments for its flexible ligaments and disability for picking up things.

When he was brought to us, we decided to give him a plastic ball and tighten up it a couple of times. It was very difficult to do this because he was so afraid of Big Boy – the oldest horse in the home.

At first, he thought that he would not concentrate on his duties. So, we decided to move forward and began teaching him the basic concepts of horse riding. Despite the fact that he is still attending our seasons, he has developed amazing skills using pencils. Nevertheless, his mother recently informed me that he has tremendously improved in math at school. I’m so proud of him.

In conclusion, I would like to say that our team does not levy charges for the seasons. Even if it is so challenging to bring up such a small home made hippo therapy centre, our success has been attributed to the parents whom we work with. They are so cooperative and have helped us to maintain our four-legged therapists through a constant provision of grass bales. If it were not for their understanding, we would not achieve anything.