Wearing my school uniform

I finally started my externship for my dog training schooling. I went to the Humane Soociety last night and met Robyn, my mentor for the next little while (at least 12 weeks). I am attending 6 week class with Jasmine, training her. Then I will attend another one of her 6 week classes where I will do some teaching myself. I will also start doing my volunteer training hours at the Humane Society shortly. My uniform is just a polo shirt that has the school's logo and displays that I am a student.

The class is fairly large, between 10-12 dogs. The smallest dog is a dauschund puppy and the largest is an almost full grown (but still a puppy) Akita mix weighing about twice as much as Jasmine. There is one dog in there that is reported to be dog aggressive but he was playing with other dogs after class with no problems. I wish I had taken Bear to one of these classes as a puppy just for the purpose of being able to introduce him to other dogs so he maybe wouldn't have developed a hate/fear of other dogs of course everything else I would have learned from classes would have been good too.

After class, I asked Robyn how to get Bear to learn the focus cue. I have been able to teach Jasmine and Jack but Bear just refuses to look at my face when I try. She told me to put my face just in front of his so he doesn't have far to look...as soon as he makes eye contact, give him a treat. It actually worked. It doesn't work every time but it is progress!

Since I had the treats out, I decided to try to teach Jasmine a game. I put a treat in one hand, closed both hands and let her sniff both fists. Then, she paws the one with the treat in it. She picked it up really easily except she doesn't always do the sniffing part. She just paws one hand and I open it. If there's no treat in it, she paws the other. It's funny but she hasn't quite gotten it down yet. I tried it with Jack too but he really had no idea what I was trying to get him to do. So after watching Jasmine do it, he started shaking hands with me intently. His dew claws really dig in! He never got it so I moved on to something he already knew.