December schedule

Do you struggle to get your dog's attention without a cookie (or toy!) in your hand? Are you tired of your dog only responding to a cue when you reach into your pocket?

Do you have a dog that plays great at home but ignores the toy in public? Is your dog lacking confidence in tug or gets distracted in fetch? Or a dog that gets too excited about toys and struggles to focus on work or shift back to a food reward? Maybe your dog has invented their own game of keep away and just won’t bring that toy back. All of these are common problems when developing toy play and are often due to a lack of motivation or an unclear understanding of the game.

Engagement is the most challenging skill to achieve in dog training. It’s also easily the most important. An engaged dog is actively involved in the learning process and pushing you for more. When a dog is offering engagement, the environment fades away and all their focus is on you. No more begging or bribing our dogs for attention. Establishing a strong foundation for engagement sets you up for future success both when training and trialing. In this class we will cover acclimation, how to teach your dog to offer engagement, what to do when we lose engagement, and how to best utilize our reinforcers. We will look at how to maintain engagement when the dog is in front of us, next to us and away from us.

Building Bravery is a six-week, game-based class designed to help dogs grow confident, curious, and optimistic in the face of new challenges. Using play, communication, and trust-building exercises, you’ll discover how fun it can be to turn worry into wonder and hesitation into resilience.

This is a class about preparing our dogs for the competition or seminar environment. Over and over I see dogs that are unprepared or rehearsing behavior we don't want at seminars, classes and trials. Over time this leads to more stress from both handler and dog and I want to help out with that!

Ready to build a dog who loves working with you — no matter what’s happening around them?

Do you end up doing a palm-to-face plant every time you start a shaping project? Using shaping to teach behaviours to our dogs can be both exhilarating and downright frustrating. Sometimes we fly along, and other times well, we just can’t get to the next step or even know if we should add a cue. You get frustrated, your dog gets frustrated, and you both lose your enthusiasm for the game and may even end up quitting. If this has ever happened to you, trust me you’re not alone.

This class dives into the Six C’s framework: Compassion, Connection, Clarity, Confidence, Curiosity, and Creativity. Together, these elements strengthen behavior by improving focus, engagement, and recovery when training gets challenging. Great training isn’t just about fixing or obtaining behavior… it’s about creating understanding that allows for joyous work and clarity.