Pick of the Litter Dog Training

Me and my Doberman puppy signed up for Jennifer’s Puppy Kindergarten when he was just 12 weeks old. I knew I wanted to start early as he is a powerful breed and needed to be socialized in the prime window of socialization. Kindergarten was great because she kept things fun for the puppies allowing two 5 – 10 minute play sessions into each hour long class and introduced them to a new agility piece of equipment each week to help with confidence. All her teachings use positive reinforcement so no prongs, spray bottles etc and rewarding with treats at this young age. After Kindergarten we continued on to Puppy Next Step where we worked on more advanced skills and adding distractions, in this class we still had playtime, but it was only one 5 – 10 minute session which I think was perfect. We are now on our final installment of obedience classes at POTL (intermediate manners) which has no playtimes as the dogs are at least 6 months of age or older. It is our last week and we covered stays at distance and distractions, walking politely on lead, greeting strangers without toppling them over, and much more while we weaned away treats. The final week you are given the option if you chose to test for the CGC so many of the skills needed to pass that test are in this intermediate manners class. We are so happy to have found POTL and Jennifer and that we were able to go through her entire obedience series from kindergarten to intermediate manners, it really has helped with bonding me and my pup. I have actually had other trainers when we go to other centers for private lessons comment about how well trained he is for his age and what kind of classes we have taken :) We will be continuing on to Nosework with my doberman, but will be keeping my eye out for POTL’s next intermediate manners class to possibly take my other dog through!

My little one was enrolled in her puppy kindergarten class. Jennifer is very easy going and accommodating. The breed of my puppy is naturally not trusting of strangers, and our instructor made sure to never push our pup into anything she wasn’t ready for. For puppy kindergarten, she also allows you to attend multiple classes each week, for no additional cost! We definitely took advantage of this since our pup started out very shy of dogs as well.
She’s an extremely patient instructor, and typically will go over 2 – 4 different things each class. She also introduces a different agility item each class, to socialize the pups to the equipment. There’s normally 2 puppy playtimes each lesson, one at the beginning and at the end. I’m appreciative that she also locks the doors at all times, to avoid any accidental escapes. The only critique I could give is that sometimes the lessons can be a little disorganized and can get side tracked a bit, but overall the lessons are fairly cheap. Also, I noticed this comes up as an Auburn company, but our lessons are out of the Kent Memorial Park building on Central.

Jennifer is wonderful!!!
My husband and I signed our pitbull up for her «fiesty fido» class because she was getting into a habit of pulling when she would see another dog. This was unacceptable behavior for us because she needs to be on her best behavior at all times. It was getting to the point where I would avoid another dog if one was walking on the same side of the street.
Jennifer is very knowledgable and you can tell right away her years of experience with working with many different breed of dogs. She likes to keep her class limited to a certain amount of dogs to make sure that she spends the appropriate amount of time to work on each dogs issues and our concerns.
I heard of a dog training class nearby that sprays the dogs face with water or bitter liquid in order to get them to stop doing bad behavior. This was not the way that I wanted to train my dog and traumatize her.
Jennifer does not believe in that sort of negative reinforcement. Our dog has learned so much already and she is not even done with the classes. My husband and I have seen a HUGE improvement on her behavior and have learned many training tips that have proved to us that they really do work!
Pick of the litters pricing is VERY reasonable and is a great investment to having a better dog.

Puppy kindergarten classes are a great value and convenient due to the open enrollment. We started the classes when my puppy was 8 weeks old and I’m really glad I did.
Initially I was disappointed with the classes, expecting more training. (I’m somewhat of a «tiger mom» and as a first time dog owner didn’t know what to reasonably expect.) But now that I’ve gone through other classes and see my 7 month old pup interact with other dogs I see the impact these classes had.
Early socialization is important if your dog will interact with others and this class is great for that. My dog has zero issues with other dogs or people and is a happy regular at doggy daycare.
The classes were fun and I like how open to questions the teacher was. Young puppies have the attention span of, well, young puppies. So the play breaks and fun training techniques were really important. Also great to tire them out for the evening! The teacher was also observant during play and noticed that my puppy was toy possessive and helped us work on that early on.
For the price and convenience I recommend the classes!

jennifer is really great. i adopted a young dog who only knew how to sit and i wanted to bond with him — dog training is a great way to do that. i’ve been to dog training when i lived in california with my other 2 dogs and hubby used to teach dog training, so i know how beneficial it can be.
since it’s open enrollment, we had the first 4 weeks all to ourselves and we got some great one-​on-​one work done and i got to know my dog really well. then when the session officially started, there were other dogs in the class and i was much better prepared to handle my dog’s reactions because i knew what to expect based on getting to know his insecurities and how to work on them.
i love her positive reinforcement approach and how she takes things slowly or quickly, depending on the dog’s abilities and skills.

Jennifer’s a god-​sent! I had gone to a puppy group class with my then 12wks old, 1.7lbs puppy, which turned out to be the biggest mistake. The trainer didn’t know how to handle tiny puppies and as a result of that dreadful class (I only went for three weeks, but the damage was done) my formerly very confident and well socialized puppy had developed a serious fear of other dogs. Jennifer has been helping me fix that and the grooming aggression– puppy would bite the brush and then bite my hand, but not any more. My puppy is still a handful and doing things that I never knew dogs did– my older dog is pretty much a saint– so there is a long way ahead of us to go, but the private lessons with Jennifer has helped me through the very dark days of my relationship with the new, not-​my-​idea puppy. She doesn’t just prescribe doggy behavioral theories on you, but will actually really look at the dog and deal with issues individually, taking into account the dog’s personality and the human’s ability to keep up with the homeworks (which I don’t have…) Her fees are really reasonable and she drives up to Seattle for my home privates. Our saved relationship is totally worth the cost!