Dog agility week 4 and herding update

I took Fly and Callie to agility class Tuesday. We are 4 weeks into a 6 week session.

Fly is taking Jumps class. So far she has learned to jump 6 jumps in a row with a single 'go' command'. She is also beginning to follow me from jump to jump, especially as we go around corners. Fly is still a pup and doesn't pay much attention to me in the ring. She especially is easily distracted by other dogs. Our homework this week is to work on 'watch me' and more angled jumps with a final goal of jumping in a circle. I need to slow down and keep a closer eye on Fly.

Callie is taking beginning agility handling mostly so I can learn handling skills. So far she is the star of the class and has received many accolades of 'perfect run'. We learned 'front crosses' and Callie did well with that. When we tried 'back crosses' however we ran into Callie's weak spot. She does NOT like being handled, she has NEVER like to be picked up. To teach the back cross I first had to teach her to 'switch' away from me. Basically , if she is on my left, I want her to do a left hand turn away from me and at the same time I'm also turning left. Then Callie ends up on my right side. We were able to do this to the right using her 'spin' command but doing this on the left was much harder and of course when I tried to cue her by touching her side, she just backed away. Anyway, after a few days we got it worked out and now she basically has a spin both clockwise and counter-clockwise.
Now, lets return to the 'back cross'. During class we didn't do well. We decided that I can basically outrun Callie ( she IS 10 ) and we don't really need a back cross! Ok, thats wimping out but I DO need to learn this for Fly. Homework with Callie; Work on a 'go' command to get her to work in front of me.

Herding update:
We are about 4 weeks into herding lessons for Fly. She has a lot of natural instinct so I'm taking her to Brazito to play with sheep. She is learning how to get the sheep to move. These last two lessons she has been in the 5 acre field. The first time she ran at 110% speed for the first two minutes and then she crashed. She did get back in the game but MAN she has a long tongue. At one point she was running with her tongue hanging out 4 inches and it was FLAPPING! Monday she only ran at top speed for about 30 seconds. She then settled down a bit and was doing great circles around the sheep. Laurie is working on getting Fly to go 'out', that is , not so close to the sheep. She is also trying to get Fly to change directions and go counter-clockwise (Away) as well as she does clockwise (Come by). Fly took a couple of direction changes well and was also doing a nice 'balance' of the sheep to Laurie. The goal is to be able to move the sheep in a figure 8 with Laurie leading and Fly pushing. Updates to follow!

p.s.
You'll be glad to know I bought a belly band for the single horse harness so we'll have no more repeats of the cart incident from the last post! Can't wait to use it and I hope I measured it correctly and its big enough to get around both Babe and Bobs bellies.