Adventure Unleashed!

The Ohio 4-H Teen Dog Experience is now operating under Adventure Unleashed LLC. We are  excited about this new change, and all the opportunities that come with it. 4-H Dog Camp will stay the same, but we will also be offering other camps, classes, workshops and trips. To keep up to date with what is happening check out Adventure Unleashed's Blog, Website, Facebook, or YouTube. As always, let us know if you have any questions!

State Fair Results

Excellent job to all of our camp kids who showed at State Fair!  You all did an awesome job. Special congratulations to Rachelle F on a great performance during her final year of 4-H.

Abby and Ariel, Gilmore, Bella, and Mowgli:

3 Gold Medals in Level One Agility

13th, 14th and 15th Rally Novice B

4th, 7th, 8th and 9th Rally Advanced B

2nd, 2nd, 3rd, and 3rd Rally Excellent A

5th Pre-Novice Team

Bronze Medal 4-H Pet Pals

3rd- Drill Team 4-5 members

5th- Freestyle Beginner A

1st- Freestyle Sassy Seniors

Exhibitor Versatility Award

Rachelle F and Sander:
1st, 1st, 1st Rally Excellent A
3rd Open A
9th Veterans
3rd Wildcard Open
6th Senior Poster
10th Showmanship Senior B
11th You and Your Dog Senior B




Rachelle H and Autumn
Bronze Medal in On Leash Agility
3rd Novice A
2nd Advanced Team
10th You and Your Dog Int B




Katie and Chase:
2 Gold Medals in Level 3 Agility
2nd Grad Novice B
1st Freestyle Beginner B



Megan and Polo:
2nd Open B
10th Rally Novice B
1st You and Your Dog Int. B
Outstanding Achievement Skillathon




Myranda and Duke:
Bronze Level 2 Agility



Rachel P and Mocha
Gold Medal Level 2 Agility
Gold- 4-H Petpals

Teen Counselors

Rachelle (TC) and Helen washing dishes.
 I told you that  our campers are awesome!

Our Teen Counselors(TC's) are awesome. They know this, but some of you may not. Actually all of our campers are awesome, but the TC’s are awesome with an extra bit of responsibility added in. The idea of our TC program is to not only to make our jobs easier and camp better, but also to give our kids an opportunity to develop their teaching and leadership skills in an environment where they will succeed. In some cases, the TC program also prepares campers to be actual counselors when they age out of 4-H.  This last responsibility may eventually become a problem:) TC’s are expected to set an example at camp, they are the ones that we expect to make sure new campers feel welcome, the tag system makes sense to everyone, dishes get done, and the cabins stay clean. They also help make sure that campers and dogs are ready and prepared for activities. Teen Counselors are also asked to prepare a lesson of their choice and teach this lesson.

All important things, but there is one important, and possibly unknown reason we keep them around. Pranks! If you haven’t figure it out, we love pranks at camp. We like the atmosphere they encourage, the mix of seriousness, competitiveness and fun. Pranks started out as red cabin vs blue cabin, the history of them is worthy of a separate post. But somehow they spread to camper vs counselor, which created a slight problem. We could have some input on cabin vs cabin pranks. But the whole idea of counselor vs camper pranks is that we have NO IDEA what the plan is. Enter the teen counselors. They are all returning campers, over the age of 15, and there are two per cabin. Some have been to camp for as many as five years. They have figure out what are acceptable pranks, and what are not, and have earned our trust.

I won’t ruin it for you, but when you read the (eventual) pranks blog post you will see why our teen counselors are awesome, and how they did a wonderful job planning and managing a prank that will be talked about for years, while still keeping everyone safe.  Our teen counselors are awesome and we keep them around for a reason! And no, it is not just because they can make excellent lemonade, although that might be what they’d tell you.

Teen Counselor Megan helping Cassady design a course

Photos and video courtesy of Liz Bailey

Blindfolded Cupcake decorating

What happens when you combine cupcakes, colored frosting, candy, more colored frosting and blindfolds? A mess. And a LOT of laughing. And more mess. Possibly with some accents and bonnets thrown in. Oh wait, and did I mention that there is a mess?

But beyond that mess is a purpose, and a history. The first time we did this activity was with pizza, three years ago. The campers worked in pairs or small groups. One was blindfolded, the other gave directions. We gave them very little instruction initially, just that the learner could not be touched or physically guided in anyway and that they must stay blindfolded. Blue cabin had four or five pizzas to make, but because of a cookie sheet shortage, two of these pizzas were going to be made in a pan with 1” sides.  Dough was spread out, a camper was blindfolded, a few more instructed and we sat back and watched. The first few went about as well as you could imagine, with a very interesting distribution of ingredients, but they were still edible. The problem came when blue cabin got to the pans with sides. Sauce was poured and then more sauce, until finally someone convinced the “learner” to stop. Apparently the lack of side on normal pan had been some sort of cue, and without it information of when to stop was missing.

At this point in time the campers realized that they needed to remove some sauce, and gave instructions to Abby on how to get sauce back into the bowl. Unfortunately for them, they were lacking in clarity, and although the scooping off occurred for a few minutes, it was all done with the wrong side of the spoon. Frustration occurred,  and they decided to just go on and add the cheese. Needless to say, the “pizza soup”, as we refer to it was not edible, but a good lesson was learned. Clear communication is important! If the learner is not understanding something it is not their fault. Change the way something is being taught or explained instead of getting angry or frustrated.

The purpose of blindfolded cupcake decorating is the same, but it allows for more creativity and an increased challenge. And the campers love it, to the point that we were going to decorate “fancy cupcakes” instead this year instead of blindfolded cupcakes like last year, but they refused. Watch the video below of Rachelle giving instructions to Helen. Notice the clear directions and the focus despite the distractions and accent.

Agility Scrabble

Every year at camp we try to come up with new, creative, yet still useful and fun activities. Some go over well, some fail miserably, but occasionally there is a new activity that becomes a much loved tradition. Dumbbell throwing contest, blindfolded cupcake decorating, blindfolded obstacle course, and making pizzas all fit into this category. Agility scrabble has yet to prove itself long term, but given the response of the campers this year it has potential to be added to this category. The game is obviously based off of scrabble, and is the result of a thrift store trip where Abigail and Karin were unable to turn down a $2 game of Jenga. While stuck inside due to a bad storm this winter, a fit of extreme boredom led us to defacing our game to create a parkour version of Jenga, which led to obedience Jenga, and finally after some brainstorming, agility Scrabble. 

We took a Scrabble Junior board (because it was $1.79), added the typical Scrabble words (triple word score, double word score, double letter score) and wrote the name of agility obstacles on back of the scrabble tiles. Each agility obstacle had a point value, with weaves being the highest value (10 points), and jumps being the lowest (1 point). 

Campers were divided into two teams of fairly equal experience. (In our case this was red cabin and blue cabin as we love to encourage cabin competition at camp!) Like in “normal” Scrabble, each team drew seven tiles from the box from which they would attempt to create a “word” or sequence of agility obstacles that connected with the tiles already played. Here is where the fun twist to this game comes into play. To be able to leave their tiles on the board (and thus collect the much desired points!) one dog/handler team had to perform the sequence on the obstacles how they were set up in the ring. If they were successful, they received the points and the tiles stayed on the board. If they made a mistake, no points were awarded and the tiles were removed. Every dog/handler pair on the team had to run a sequence once before anyone could go a second time. 

Like we generally do with new activities, we only scheduled a 30 minute time slot for agility Scrabble. We like to keep activities that could be epic failures (older campers will remember carting...) short in the event that it is going horribly. This makes it easy to end the activity before dogs, campers, and counselors become frustrated. NINETY MINUTES later, we realized that this was NOT the case with agility Scrabble as we had to on-the-fly come up with a new end to the game.  We feared that if we didn’t limit the campers to two runs apiece, they would play Scrabble until either they or their dogs were incapable of moving any longer.

What we realized is that this game did not just encourage the handler to have an honest assessment of their own dog’s capability and design an appropriate level course, it also encourages a never seen before level of intensity. The campers were analyzing the dog and handler, the fluency of their behaviors, how risky a course was, if it was worth the risk, and how they could get the most points with the obstacles they had. Dog camp tends to get intense, but the level of focus, discussion and analyzing was impressive even by our standards. As the game got closer to our designated 2 rounds finishing point, teams went for longer and longer sequences, but still within the limits of the dog/handler pair. At one point towards the end of the game Rachelle, with her dog C-ATCH Sander, completed a tricky, but high-point sequence and said “I think I was more nervous for that run than I was during my C-ATCH run.” All of the campers learned important lessons in how dog’s behaviors can change or even fall completely apart under pressure that is similar to what is felt when trialing. It came down to the final run, with red cabin catching up from behind and barely beating blue cabin by nine points. It is a game definitely worth playing again and hopefully we have stumbled upon a new favorite camp game for years to come!

2012 Dog Camp- Thank you!

We just finished the 2012 Ohio 4-H Teen Dog Experience, and as always we had an excellent time! This year we had ten campers, seven of which were returning from past years. For the first time we also had five year campers (three of them!). A huge thanks to all of these campers for helping make camp so special.

Camp included our typical activities such as agility, flyball, obedience, rally obedience, tracking,freestyle, blindfolded cake decorating, blindfolded obstacle course, health and behavior sessions, tug toys and many others. New this year were Agility Scrabble, Obedience Jenga, Pet photography and Treiball! We will share more details on these in future posts.

Quite a few people deserve a huge thank you, we couldn’t have such an awesome camp without everyone’s support.  Thank you to our nurse, Stacey Williams, for not only being our nurse, but for jumping in and helping with cleaning, appreciating the foolishness, and having some fun with her adorable dogs. Liz Bailey, for taking so many excellent photos and videos, which we hope to share with you all soon. Rachel Olson, for being an excellent counselor and instructor. She managed to gracefully make the transition from camper to counselor. Our sponsors allow us to keep costs low, have an excellent raffle and give us the opportunities to try new activities (and feed the campers). Thanks to BOC Water Hydraulics (4 year sponsor!), Nodding Onion Garden (2  year sponsor), Kroger (2 year sponsor), Bark Magazine (2 year sponsor), Kong ( 3 year sponsor) and United Dairy Farmers (new sponsor, our campers LOVED the ice cream!).

Not to be forgotten are  Bud and Marsha Houston, for letting them us rent their amazing facility, putting up with the noise and chaos that results from 10 teenagers and their dogs, and going out of their way to allow us to make camp special. This was our fifth year at their facility, and we can’t think of a better place to hold camp.  Perhaps most importantly we want to thank all of our campers and their families. Camp is amazing because of all of you!

Preparing for Camp

Thanks to camp, this is how my room/office area looks like. There is a box of stuff to go in Blue, a box for Red, prizes, craft supplies, give-aways, harnesses, reading materials, more harnesses, notebooks and handouts, cooking supplies....


When camp is over it magically all hides in my closet or on top of a big shelf. But for the next week, this is where it will be.

See you next week campers!

Camp and Workshops

Camp Applications are available on our website. We will be having two camps this year.

"Canine Explorers" is for 4-H members 13 and older that have 1-3 years of 4-H dog experience. This is a good fit for 4-H members that participate in 1-2 dog activites projects and are primarily only involved in 4-H projects.
"Canine Challengers" is for 4-H mebers age 14 and older, who have 3+ years of 4-H dog experience. 4-H members applying for this camp should have dog experience outside of 4-H, participate in multiple dog activities or have attended camp two or more years.

We will also be holding three one day "mini-camp" CLICK workshops. All 4-H members, parents, and advisors are invited to attend.

This years locations are:

May 9th: Cambridge Park Armory, Cambridge OH
12:00-6:00pm

May 22nd: Posidog Canine Learning Center, Grove City, OH
1:30-7:00pm

May 23rd: Mercer County Fairgrounds, Celina OH
12:00-6:00pm

Applications for the workshops will be on our site within the next few days. We hope to see you there!

Five Tips for Success in 4-H

1) Get rid of your food bowl. Your dog gets all meals through training or in food toys like the "Kibble Nibble" or "Tug a Jug."

2) Practice every day. Short training sessions are important (2-3 minutes at a time, or less!).

3) Be Prepared. Know what you have to do for your level of competition. Know the rules.

4) Go to meetings and practices. Work hard and be attentive in class. Ask questions and help each other.

5) Each session, work on only one skill. It is very important to practice one thing lots of time to make the changes happen in your dog's brain. A few repetitions is not sufficient.

Obedience is great!

Kristen

Teen Conference

We had a great time at Teen Conference and were happy to see four of our campers, and one was even presenting!

Thanks to our campers who helped with activities. You're the best!

State wide 4-H events are a great thing to attend, there is always a lot to learn and interesting people to meet.

A summary of our two sessions:

Teaching New Skills:
This session was super interesting! We will definitely be playing with some of these activities at camp. We started out with a communication exercise, challenging groups to be clear and concise. From there...we were teaching either skills they did not know or teaching skills their partner did not know. One of the most common demonstrations was "rabbit/chicken handling" and "rabbit-chicken putting in/out of cages." So many of these members said it was one of the hardest things to learn in their project areas. They had their partners doing the activity within minutes!

I was especially excited about this as we have been talking about one of our camp activities this year to be on animal handling and restraint. Using Sophia Yin's book _Low Stress Handling, Restraint and Behavior Modification of Dogs & Cats_ When I read this book, I thought "WOW, this would be a great TagTeach activity to do at camp! We can start with stuffed dogs and go cooperative real dogs!"


Our other session was on clicker training animals. We were surprised, not only did we have a huge attendance, but more people came than we expected. Clicker training is simple but not easy! It was exciting to see the variety of species everyone had (livestock, to horses, to dogs, to birds!)and the interest. Next year we will probably break down our activities even further. If anyone remembers our activities from the previous year, we've learned hands on is better than lectures...but hands on for 50 people is -quite- a challenge!

Thanks to all our campers who attended and assisted.