Daycare Photo Journal

November 2006: Well, October was a busy, busy month! We had a great time demonstrating agility, flyball, rally, and competition obedience at Paws in the Park, hosted the Obedience Club of Chattanooga and a huge AKC Obedience and Rally trial, held a Rally workshop, graduated our 13th session of group classes, and began training our first READ dogs. Dogs reading?! Well, Border Collies, maybe, but for the rest of them, the Read Aloud Chattanooga program is about kids reading to dogs. The idea is to give children a non-judgmental and undemanding audience to practice their reading skills on. The kids associate reading with all of the great things about dogs, they become better readers, and hopefully better humans for spending their time more productively. The dogs get to visit new and exotic places like churches, schools, and libraries, and get loved on by kids. And, as dog owners and trainers, we get the chance to contribute in a way that is personally meaningful and satisfying. What a terrific concept! The Read Aloud Chattanooga people even commissioned this ultra-cool mural for our training facility. These people think BIG - their goal is to have a trained READ (Reading Assistance Education Dogs) dog for every school in Hamilton County. We're piloting the training program and certification process now, and plan to have it ready to roll out by spring 2007. If you're interested, you can get started now by taking the Canine Good Citizen class and/or test, then getting certified by Therapy Dogs International. [ More here ]

And, since I have your attention, a couple of announcements: PDX will be closed for daycare on Thanksgiving Day (11/23) and the day after (11/24), and the entire week between Christmas and New Year's Day (12/25-1/1). We'll miss our furry friends, as well as their generally-less-furry other halves, but we're just about ready for a long winter's nap. Thanks, and enjoy November's pictures!  -- Bev