Port Chester Obedience Training Club's Family Manners program is based on our belief that training a dog should be a fun, enjoyable experience for all parties, whether your goal is a well-mannered family pet or an obedience champion. For puppies and dogs of all ages, Family Manners classes help to build a happy, lasting bond, and a harmonious relationship between dog and owner. This unique program, carefully developed by our team of instructors, offers a range of classes for all dogs, utilizing positive reinforcement methods.
Emphasizing life skills and household manners, we also introduce students to a variety of fun and challenging dog sports and other activities. Adding more challenges as skills increase, PCOTC's Family Manners classes teach handlers how to teach their dogs to love learning and working.
Family Manners classes have a maximum student/teacher ratio of 8:1, allowing ample opportunity for coaching as well as question and answer breaks to address common household issues.
What Classes Are Like
Puppy and Foundation classes emphasize life skills, safety, and household manners, while introducing students to a variety of fun dog sports. Advanced classes introduce off leash work, increase duration and distance, and proof behaviors with distractions to practice “real world” challenges. Students will also learn to read their dog’s body language so that teams can better communicate and work together.
Examples of Skills You’ll Learn
Sit, Down, Stay, Come, Loose leash walking, Crate games, Polite greetings, Name recognition, Impulse control, Informal retrieving, Working off leash, Reading canine body language
WHERE TO START?
AKC Star Puppy or Puppy Pre-K is for dogs up to 20 weeks old. Classes focus on socialization with people and other puppies, and fundamental exercises including name recognition, walking on-leash, sit, down, and come. Supervised playtime builds the pups' confidence. We also cover crate training, and discuss housetraining, teething and chewing, safety in the car, choosing safe toys, diet, and grooming tips. Clicker training is introduced.
Dogs over 20 weeks join the Family Manners: Foundation class, which emphasizes core basic training, manners and safety. Exercises include sitting to greet, name recognition with distractions, sit, down, and stand with increasing duration, coming when called, and walking nicely on-leash. Clicker training is introduced.
For those who have mastered Family Manners: Foundation, Family Manners: Skills builds the bridge to developing more formal obedience skills by increasing duration and distance, and proofing with safe distractions appropriate to each dog's level of ability. Skills students also master left and right turns, about turns, down from stand, recalls to front with distractions, sit and down with walk-arounds, serpentines, and cone work, mat work while playing fun games.
Family Manners: Unleashed!, is a high level intermediate class where students work toward off-leash reliability through further proofing of core skills, including recalls, stays, and leash walking/heeling. More distance work, retrieving, nose work and advanced targeting are introduced. Teams participate in games, including the "Ultimate Stay and Recall Challenges."
Interested in Family Manners electives? During each session there are a variety of family manners electives offered with various focuses.
Those wishing to really test their dogs skills can complete the certification for the AKC Canine Good Citizen (CGC) and AKC Community Canine® (CGCA) test.