Hi! Here is what I have so far for level 5
More heeling steps straight forward
- She is moving her head around when we take off, and that causes her to either veer her body back behind my or occasionally she floats off away from my leg. We're just going to keep practicing until she understands that she's getting clicked for being at my side... Maybe we're ready to move away from a wall?
“Wrap” hand signal
“Wrap” sit
“Wrap” verbal cue
- The angel is not so good for seeing me, but I start with just the hand signal. I'm clicking for her putting two front feet on the mat with head up. I think I'm going to go back to just the hand signal until I can straighten her out. Should I maybe use a back foot target to get her to get those back legs all the way around?
Verbal pivot cue
- Same problem of wrapping around too much into heel. I just started adding the cue to this, so she sometimes offers the wrong behavior... I am not rewarding those attempts! I'm also reverse luring with food in my hand out to the side when I say the verbal. So for the last attempt without the target, I call her, cue the heel, and then use the lure to get her into position.
Still need to do wrap from front and heel, and work on quarter turns
The side step is definitely something we have not faded out yet...(and the secret is, I think that's actually the cue lol). We will work on that next! We need to work on me being still for other cues as well, like front.
A single wrap on (mostly) a verbal cue!
Here is some work on wrap from heel and front, and 1/4 turns. I have not been able to get wrap on a reliable verbal cue.... I talk and signal at the same time a lot, it's a bad habit. Plus, I had Willa today and she was barking in the room next door, which often happened at the moment I said wrap. So I'm relying a lot on luring!
But! One really nice heel forward from wrap happens at the very end❤️ She looks so happy:))
Heeling forward:
Her head (and everything else) looks good to me! I see tiny little movements in the first rep, but she keeps her head high, and since it gets better with more reps, I'm not currently worried about those little movements. Do you feel like the head thing you described is shown in this video?
No, don't do much off the barrier yet. The curriculum walks you through that systematically, when we combined heeling forward with left turns. (Level 7.)
Wrap:
This looks good! I would rather her be a little extra scooted in than swung out. And she's nice and tight with you, which I think is different than the last time I saw her wrap.
I would not do a back foot target. Can you move her with your reward? Like, while you're feeding her, you can also lure her into the exact position you want. She can probably scoot that tiny bit forward and stay sitting.
(Then, off in the future, you can do a similar thing by asking her to touch your hand to land in the right spot. But don't worry about that yet. What you've got going is good.)
Target:
If the verbal cue is new, try warming her up with offered behavior and/or lured (or whatever, extra help) for a couple of reps before you start saying your cue. Good job setting things up so that she figures it out, though.
You can click and feed before she over-pivots, and also adjust her with your reward by luring with the reward.
Anticipation/breaking the sit/target to get to you:
Since she is breaking her stay sometimes to get to you again, I would recommend walking back to her and feeding her in place half the time, and releasing her half the time. If you want to even deal with that in your session, that is! And if she's already using her brain a lot for everything else, feel free to reset her in a different way.