Posted on

How to Use Exploration to Teach Your Kids to Swim

The more your kids direct their own learning when you’re teaching them to swim, the more engaged and ready to learn they’ll be. Instead of directing them, you need to involve them in the process of discovery, but how do you do that?

After you explain and demonstrate a swimming skill, use questions and suggestions to guide your kids through the process. This method of teaching is a little bit like being a journalist. Instead of asking yes/no questions, ask open-ended questions that give your kids a chance to use their problem-solving skills to learn to swim. For example:

Instead of:

  • Can you blow bubbles?

Try:

  • If you were going to blow bubbles, how would you start?
  • What’s your favorite way to blow bubbles?
  • Show me how you blow bubbles.
  • Let’s blow bubbles together.

Give suggestions or clues to help. Instead of saying, “Touch the water with your lips,” say, “What would happen if you touched the water with your lips?” or “How about trying to touch the water with your lips?”

Use games and imagination to reinforce and expand skills and to make repetition and practice interesting. Games and imagination engage the learner so that he practices without realizing it’s practice. Games also distract from fears and discomfort.

Has your child ever told you he’s hungry only at bedtime after the fun and activity of the day are finally over? Playing games and using imagination when you’re teaching your kids to swim will help them experience the swimming lesson as a fun, flow-state activity. They’ll want to stay in the pool and keep practicing, and they’ll want to come back tomorrow.

Kids learn by playing. Plan ahead, choosing several games to try. If one doesn’t interest your child, try another. When your child tries changing or expanding a skill you’re practicing or a game you’re playing, you might be tempted to narrow his focus. Don’t. Encourage him to try things he initiates, as long as you’re there to keep him safe.

Posted on

How to Demonstrate Swimming Skills for Safety and Success

After you explain to your kids what you’ll be teaching in the swimming lesson, it’s time to show it. Here’s how to demonstrate safely and effectively.

Demonstrating Swimming Skills Safely and Effectively

  1. Make sure your child is safe. If it’s possible to demonstrate the skill while you’re holding your child, keeping him fully supported, do that. Otherwise, make sure he’s safely out of the pool before you demonstrate.
  2. Demonstrate simply. Don’t be tempted to bust a move and show off your spectacular swimming prowess at this point. To help your child learn to swim, you want to make him feel comfortable and capable. Making the skill look manageable will help.
  3. Demonstrate just the tiny piece you’ll be focusing on. Tiny pieces that eventually can be pieced together are less intimidating and overwhelming than a complex skill demonstrated all at once.

Setting an Example

You’re not only teaching your kids swimming skills. You’re also showing them how to feel about the water and about learning to swim. You do this by how you react to what happens in the water.

  1. Don’t overreact if your kids swallow some water. Instead, show them how to cough and blow their noses, and move on.
  2. If water gets on your face or your child’s face, don’t wipe it off. Show him that it’s okay to get water on his face by leaving it there or by making a game out of painting on each other’s faces with the water that splashes from the pool.
  3. Make it fun. If you’re having fun, your child will have fun.
Posted on

Time to Play! Gliding in Streamline Position

Kids learn by playing. The more you can making learning to swim fun for your kids, the more they’ll like it, the quicker they’ll learn, and the more fun you’ll have teaching them. When you’re teaching your kids to swim, gliding in streamline or torpedo position is one of the skills that’s the most fun for you and for them. It’s usually the kids’ first taste of what it really feels like to swim. The freedom and lightness are intoxicating! It’s fun all by itself, but you can use this game to wring every last giggle from it.

Place clues around the edge of the swimming pool. Point your child to the first clue and have him glide to it. The first clue leads to the next, and so on. The last stop should have a treat: a joke, a medal, or another prize your child will like.

Posted on

Why How You Explain Is As Important as What You Explain When You’re Teaching Your Kids to Swim

The first step in working with any skill is explaining what you’ll be doing, in both simple and imaginative terms. How do you explain a skill in a way that works for kids?

Use imagination and visualization.

In some ways, your body in the water is like a fish. In other ways, it’s like a boat. In other ways, it’s like a dancer. When you’re completely submerged, you’re like a fish. When you’re swimming on the surface of the water, you’re like a boat. When you’re moving all of the parts of your body in coordinated motion, you’re like a dancer.

When fish swim, they’re graceful. They’re balanced. They’re slippery. They move efficiently, with each motion propelling them through the water. A well designed boat slices through the water, creating as little resistance and drag as possible. A dancer is aware of where each part of his body is in space.

As you teach your kids each new swimming skill, use these themes of a fish, a boat, and a dancer to help describe how the skill fits into the whole. If the ideas of fish, boats, and dancers don’t float your child’s, um, boat, you can tailor your themes to incorporate your kids’ interests. Dancers and gymnasts are great examples of coordinated motion. So are baseball, basketball, and hockey players. Fish slip gracefully through the water, but so do mermaids.

Use all of your child’s senses to teach.

What does a skill look like, feel like, sound like? Maybe your child can even associate a taste or smell with a particular skill. The more hooks you can use to capture your child’s attention and imagination, the more deeply he’ll learn the skill.

Boil it down.

Once you’ve discussed the concepts in all sorts of imaginative ways, be prepared to boil down what you’re teaching your child to do into just one or two words. The background ideas of fish and boats are a foundation for his interest and understanding. The simple instruction to “blow bubbles” or kick with “knees straight” will help your child to focus in the moment on exactly what he needs to do to learn the swimming skill you’re teaching him.

If your child expresses fear, try to reframe that fear as excitement and possibility. If that doesn’t work, don’t force him to try doing what he fears. Work towards it instead. Move on to demonstrating. Backtrack to practicing skills he’s already mastered if necessary and come back to your explanation of the new skill from a new angle.

What’s next? The next element of the pattern for teaching your kids a swimming skill is demonstrating and setting an example, but before we get into that, it’s time to take a break. Tomorrow’s Friday, and Friday is time to play.