A Plan Comes Together

I love teaching weaves. There’s always a part where I hate it, right around the bit where it seems like we’ve been working on them forever and nothing is happening. But then it all comes together and I remember why I love it.

As you may have guessed, Rio’s weaves have clicked. She has beautiful weaves. I’m so happy I switched her back on to the Vs, her footwork is lovely and she’s getting her head down to drive through in the way I love. She’s going to be much, much, faster through the weaves than Dylan, and Dylan doesn’t have shabby weave speed, so that’s nice!

In the interest of fairness, I have to admit she has suddenly developed a block about me being on the right. We did a quick walk through with someone shadowing on the left and she was perfect, so I think it’s just a case of more training required. Independence looks good, she’s picking up easy entries off obstacles, and she’s done her first run of 6 to 6 weaves with lots of enthusiasm. Too much enthusiasm, actually, she does get very excited about multiple run throughs and starts going too fast for her own feet. I like the 6 > 6 method of taking them to 12 weaves, that’s my favourite part of the 2×2 method. Such an easy breakdown!

We haven’t done a lot of work on entries yet. I sometimes feel I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t train entries from day one, but I just don’t see the point. I trained progressively more difficult entries with Kim and Dylan was we went along, and only once they’d learned how to weave. It’s not like we’ll find hard weave entries in Grade 3 anyway.

As one ends, another begins. Daisy has started learning her weaves as well. I’m hesitantly giving the 2×2 method another go, mainly because Daisy will drive to a dead toy and I think that’s sort of quite important for training this method. (Rio thinks dead toys are borrring.) If it’s not working out, we’ll switch to Vs and go from there. It’s all a bit experimental with Daisy, since I don’t know what her learning curve is like for complex skills.