Before diving into this week's material, make sure to read through What is a Marker and Why Should I Be Using One?

This week is all about capturing eye contact to begin to build focus as an automatic behavior from your dog. Teaching your dog to "check in" is one of the most valuable skills you can have, and will help you communicate with your dog more effectively - after all, how are you going to ask your dog to do anything if she's not paying attention to you to begin with?

Once you've got the basic exercise down, play around with it - move around the room each time you reset your dog, change your body position (sitting, standing, crouching, etc), work in different rooms of the house, etc. This should really feel like a fun game! You can even turn it into a version of "hide and seek!"