I am teaching the agility class where I usually take classes....and things were sort of messed up, the contact obstacles were not at the yard which sort of messed up some of the plans for the class, it was a cool, cloudy day and I just deceided to do something that I thought would work for everyone and would be a lot of fun for me. The basic class plan that was left for the class was very similar but it did not have the tunnels, so I took some license and changed things a little. I have played with this particular basic box type set up a little before, but I love it, it is very simple but you can train so many skills with not that much equipment and without moving around a lot of stuff. Then it gives you a great place for the dogs to go with the tunnels at the end, so it works to build speed, motivation, or to test things like the weave poles coming out of a tunnel with a lot of whoo hoo factor and a lot of speed.
So with the first class that has the youngest dogs I was able to really walk with them and help them get some front crosses and I will say they all got their front crosses in and did marvelous. Even the youngest dog was able to just back chain small parts and ended up sequencing four obstacles with a front cross in there. I was very proud of them all. It worked great because I held the dogs before the first tunnel to start out with so they could get set up for their front crosses and practice them, then we were able to put the whole first sequence together.
The second class is a class with some more experienced people and we were able to start out helping one dog with speed and motivation by just making a huge speed circle and rewarding often, then we were able to work on a variety of skills. That was a small class so I was able to run Breeze in that class and we had a blast. I rarely get to participate in the class when I am teaching and when I taught last summer I felt like I missed out on so much of my own training time, so it was REALLY COOL to be able to work in the class today-I LOVED that!
WHEW! Teaching the class makes for a very long day, I had to take my daughter to get a tooth filled at 1 pm, and then left for class around 3, but it is a long drive there so by the time we had the two classes, with the drive, set up and clean up, I got home around 11:30.