I recently asked for blog post suggestions and several of my facebook friends suggested exploring the topic of 'play'. Great topic!  Important!  Teachable!  But way too big to attempt in a blog post, so if you're really interested in developing your understanding of Play (with toys, food or just your charming self), then you'll need to pony up $65 and take a class that I teach on-line. This class is designed for all sports - agility, obedience, flyball, etc.  Actually, it's designed for anyone who wants to have a more playful relationship with their dog, whether they compete in dog sports or not.  We'll explore possibilities for playing with a variety of "types" of dogs, and hopefully you'll leave the class with a much greater arsenal of options than you started with.    This class won't spend much time talking about applying your play skills to performance - it's about using play to develop a relationship with your dog, hence, the rather dull title, "Building Relationship Through Play".   Remind me to work on that. You can read more about the play class here: http://www.fenzidogsportsacademy.com/index.php/courses/20 I'm also teaching a class just for little dogs.  It's called, "I'm just little!".  Which suggests that I can come up with catchy titles if I'm in the right frame of mind. As I hope you know, a dog is a dog - size does not affect how a dog learns but there are challenges specific to the trainers of small dogs.  If you need help building up confidence in your pint-sized pup, want to learn how modify your play style so that your diminutive dog is more comfortable, or are looking for the secrets to making distance work easier for your itty bitty, then this class may well be for you.  We spend time on play in this class as well - just like the play class but with modifications for the littles, and I'll also give you a variety of foundation behaviors to work through.  To be honest, you'll learn quite a bit of useful stuff that can be applied to dogs of all sizes, but the focus will be on the smaller or less confident set. http://www.fenzidogsportsacademy.com/index.php/courses/2016 So...that's it for this blog.  Shameless advertising.  And if neither of those classes gets your pupils dilating, check out the rest of the schedule; we're offering more than twenty classes this term. The school has a clear mission; to support kind and respectful dog sports training.  From there, you can design a route that works for your team.  There aren't a lot of rules. Hope to see some of you there! http://www.fenzidogsportsacademy.com/index.php/schedule-and-syllabus