Our Philosophy regarding Group Lessons:
Group lessons are great for a number of reasons. First, they are longer in length. More time in the saddle means better growth, socializing with other students makes it fun and watching the mistakes and achievements of other riders will help you to develop your riding. You will notice that we intentionally group students in a way that mixes the skill levels and ages some. I find that if a student has the opportunity to be the best and most advanced rider of one group they can be used as the example both helping the other students to learn while giving much needed confidence to that rider. Then, in another lesson when that same rider is the lowest level rider of the group they can learn by example of the higher peers as well as feel challenged to strive for better riding themselves. This creates a perfect balance between growth, motivation, and confidence.
Our philosophy regarding Private Lessons:
Private lessons are great for getting started, adding a new skill, or even just touching base and receiving some personal attention.
Our Philosophy regarding the use of Multiple instructors:
The philosophy that I have found to bring the best success is to have multiple instructors available to ALL the students. Every instructor at Royal Oak has her own way of phrasing things that may help make it more clear to each student and every instructor has different strengths that they bring to the team. In the past 12 years I have found that by utilizing ALL the strengths among the instructors and all the different ways of presentation to our riders the outcome has created very WELL ROUNDED riders with great foundations. Nothing is overlooked or skipped because ALL 3 of our instructors strengths are represented in each one of our young riders.
There is a catch to this method which is why many barns have attempted this style but failed.
- 1. All the instructors must share the same overall solid background in foundation.
- 2. All instructors must communicate CONSTANTLY with each other regarding ALL Royal Oak students. The Royal Oak staff has daily conversations as well as weekly lunch meetings regarding the growth of ALL the students.
- 3. Though every rider is different we are brought together with the use of the Royal Oak Achievement Book.
- 4. We all truly enjoy what we do. So much so, that many times, even when an afternoon has dwindled to 4 or 5 riders, easily taught by 1 person, all 3 of us will stay anyways and co-teach. With 3 sets of eyes on them our students are pushed towards perfection. You get 3 times the instruction at no additional cost.
A nice bonus to the use of multiple instructors is that with so many available our times are more flexible and accommodating then just about any other barn in San Diego County.
Our Philosophy regarding the use of multiple school horses:
The goal of the riding school is to both provide a fun and affordable recreational riding program for kids in our community as well as help others along the road to purchasing their own. There are as many different types of personalities in horses as there are in people and riding different horses helps you to deal with and adapt to those many varying personalities. This both gives the rider a better and broader foundation as well as helping them to form an idea of what type of horse they may like to purchase in the future. For the goals of showing, however, it is easier to grow in a single partnership with one horse. This is why, even though we do allow our school horses to attend the on-site horse shows, if you are going to be an avid competitive show rider you will want to purchase your own horse.