Catherine Ellis loves watching autistic children make an instant connection with horses.

“I think it’s a lot of fun,” she said. “It’s really interesting to see how the kids react to the horses.”

Ellis, 15, of Glasgow, helped her grandmother Anne Sadler-Newton at Oakwood Farm Riding Academy near Oakland, where children from the Kelly Autism summer program visited several times this month. Their last visit was Thursday.

The Kelly Autism Program is offered through Western Kentucky University’s Suzanne Vitale Clinical Education Complex and provides services to those ages 7 and up who have been diagnosed along the Autism Spectrum Continuum. The KAP offers summer programs in June and July and one of the activities for this month’s session was learning about horses at the riding academy.

“This was a new experience for me and for the program,” said Lindsey Devore, program manager for the KAP. “I’ve been blown away. You can see (the children’s) confidence come out. They were very proud that they were riding a horse.”

Sadler-Newton, owner of the riding academy, said it warms her heart to watch the interaction between the children and horses. Riding horses can be therapeutic for people with autism because the animal’s movement soothes them.

“The horses seem to calm them,” Sadler-Newton said. “It’s like a miracle. They might be screaming, but once they get on the horse, they calm down.”

She’s given horse riding lessons to autistic people in the past, and when she found out about the KAP’s summer program, she decided to host the participants as a way to give back to the community. It was so successful that she plans to offer the activity to the group again next summer and several participants might take private lessons with her. 

Visiting the riding academy with the KAP was the first time Misty McClustky, 16, of Scottsville, rode a horse.

“I wasn’t quite used to it, but now I’m used to it, and I want to do it all the time,” she said. 

Her favorite horse at the riding academy is Pepe.

“He’s really nice and he’s a fast, fast horse, and I’ve always loved brown horses with black manes,” she said.

Bailey Duncan, 14, of Bowling Green, has taken riding lessons before and loved her time at the riding academy.

“It’s really fun,” she said. “I can show off my inner cowgirl.”

The experience was also fun for Charles Tillson, 11, of Scottsville.

“I like that you get to actually know the horses and actually ride them,” he said.

Jenna Clark, a staff teacher for the KAP, is amazed by the impact the horses made on students.

“There’s a lot of kids we have that you would never imagine wanting to do something like this, and they come here and thrive,” she said. “Getting on the horses has been awesome for them.”

— Laurel Wilson covers faith and general assignments for the Daily News. Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/FaithinBG or visit bgdailynews.com.