This is a wonderful book of dog training techniques. This is a well designed book full of useful information with some illustration. Training a dog is part of having a dog in the family. You will find basic training lessons, tricks, essential commands and even games to play with your dog. Other important information is included too such as dog proofing your home and preparing your dog to visit the veterinarian. You also learn about safety around your dog, foods they can’t eat and other important details. While there aren’t many illustrations going with the step details are so well written it works. So, if you are looking for a book that is great for the whole family for training your dog to heal, high five, drop it, leap and more this is the book to check out.

5 stars for quality of information. 3 stars for length/detail considering the target audience. I've worked with dogs for years, and was very impressed with the quality of information, as well as the descriptions. But this is a long book! I feel like the level of detail is relevant to teens, even adults. But the cover makes the book look like it's targeted more towards a 10 year old. And I don't know that a 10 year old has the attention span for the level of detail in the book.

I 100% recommend this for older kids though, and adults as well.

This book is such a fun read for kids! This book encourages children to interact in a meaningful way when a puppy is in the house.
We had recently watched a documentary on dogs and we also have two dogs, so my three sons were really into learning all they could about canines. The illustrations and information in this book were informative, engaging, and helpful!

This book is well structured and contains some good advice which is explained in easy language. Kids who can already read probably won't have a problem understanding it.
But I don't really like the layout of the book. The pictures are cute, but there are not enough of them and they are in grey tones. Some of the titles are in color but that is not enough to make a book appealing.
My biggest problem, however, was the formatting of the ARC. It makes reading the document strenuous and I did not finish it. Sorry.
Thank you for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

This would have been a helpful book for our family last spring when we adopted our rescue lab/setter, Moose, since it had been a while since we brought a new dog home and he had a lot to learn. The book goes through basic information about what to do when adopting a dog, with a little bit of emphasis on puppies. It goes over lots of safety information like foods dogs can't eat and how to dog-proof your house, plus things like what things you'll need to buy (some are not things I consider mandatory). Then there are basic commands to teach like recognizing their names, then simple tricks like sit and drop it, then fancier tricks like bow an for shame (put a piece of tape on their nose that they'll try to brush off so they learn to paw their face like they're ashamed), and finally fun games to play with your dog like obstacle course and soccer. All total there are about a dozen tricks, commands or games in each section, with a few more in some.

There are simple sketches showing some of the tricks but most do not have illustrations. The steps are well detailed but may be a little long and complicated for some kids. Positive training is used, with treats. Discipline is not mentioned but physical discipline is not encouraged. It's rather dog-friendly in terms of pointing out appropriate behaviors that may bother us but are normal (like sniffing other dog's rear ends) and is very gentle in training.

I disagree with some of the training advice, like the advice to train puppies to go to the bathroom inside for the first four months of their lives on puppy pads since they won't be fully vaccinated yet. And some of the training information makes things seem much easier than they probably will be, like teaching dogs to walk with a loose leash and heel. For the most part it's good, step by step techniques that should ultimately work though with patience and practice.

This is the third or fourth dog training/tricks book I've read this year and it's a pretty good one. I do prefer the books that have lots of color photos of the steps, but this one has more detail and troubleshooting of steps than some. It's also nice that this is designed specifically for kids.

All in all, this is a fun and helpful book for kids who are getting a new dog and want to have fun teaching it manners, tricks and games.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

(Note: This book did not exist on Goodreads yet despite being available for purchase later this month. I created an entry and put in all publication information for it.)