our homework for the week: practising all over the place!

What's over there?! Never mind!! Ignore the distractions, puppy!

So I was just thinking about how our foundation course with Silvia Trkman is going to start in a month, and how Lumen and my training sessions have become a little 'routineized' in that we go in, every morning and every afternoon (pretty much) to our spare room and we train.
We run through tricks based on what Lumen seems to want to do, and we'll go off on tangents for whatever's fun, unless we have a necessary focus like working on restraints with her collar, which is how we've been warming up...

But we're always in the same place.
For things like tunnels and cik/cap we're either in the backyard, down at the reserve or sometimes at the lake park where we cik/cap around trees.... But we rarely do tricks or trick training in those places.

So, I'm setting myself my own assignment for the next few weeks as it starts to cool down again - get out to different places and do those shaping tricks. Take a bowl for 4-in. Run through equiptmentless tricks we're working on like 'bang' and roll over. Get her used to not focusing ONLY when we're running around playing, but also the time before we get to run around and play, when we're doing hard thinking work.

I think for me, this will mean keeping the sessions short and sharp- asking for a little bit of shaping, or for a trick once or twice to get a good one, then having a really good exciting play. So trick-work and free-shaping has to be fun and focused even in unusual situations. Because if I can get that, agility focus will be simple, since it's more about play and running around, which she loves.