Shaping Up

Today was for shaping! I spent three sessions working on shaping a back up with the little miss. Pure free shaping, so I sat on the couch and clicked for any backward motion and used placement of reinforcement to help me out. OhLa had a hard time with this, her breakfast dish was sitting on the couch next to me. She was a wee bit obsessed with it! She never touched it, she had her nose resting right on the side of the bowl once, but never went for it. This is good, and I don't really mind that our shaping session wasn't entirely successful as her learning to work with the distraction of a food bowl right next to her is important stuff! We did manage to get some understanding of what the activity is, but definitely not a "back up" worthy of a cue just yet.
She had her second building blocks class tonight, and tonight's class was all about shaping! Great stuff, managed to get her two front feet on an overturned bowl, two front feet in the bowl, and then one of her back feet on the bowl. This morning sessions really helped, she is just starting to click in her mind that her back feet move independently of the front and that she can do something with them! Our homework this week is to teach a trick. Not sure what that's going to be yet! I might cheat and use "back up" as our trick, since we are already working on it and it hasn't been introduced in the class yet. That or I teach her something completely ridiculous!