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How to Structure Your Swimming Lesson to Make the Best Use of Your Time in the Pool

Here’s another huge advantage you have over swimming schools. What is it and how can you use it when you’re teaching your kids to swim?

It’s time out of the pool.

Of course you’ll prepare what you’re going to teach well before you get to the pool. Make sure what you’re planning to teach is a single skill. If you can break it down into simpler pieces, break it down and pick just one of the pieces to teach.

You can also take advantage of the time you spend away from the pool to prepare your child for what the day’s lesson will be. Over breakfast, you can talk about what you’ll be learning, why it’s important, and what’s fun about it. The swimming teacher you hire doesn’t have that luxury. They have to spend valuable pool time doing the things you can do before you and your kids get wet.

Start Teaching Your Kids to Swim on Dry Land

Talk with your child about what you’ll be doing. Ask your child what parts of the body he thinks he’ll be focusing on or using most. Ask why it’s important to learn the skill. Ask how he thinks it will feel. Ask what he thinks the favorite part of the lesson will be. Help him visualize how his body will move. Will he be moving like a fish? Like a boat? Tell him a story about the movement. Compare it to other animals or other activities he already knows.

Practice any elements of the skill that you can on land. Blow bubbles in a bowl or sit on the edge of a chair to practice kicking.

Lay as much groundwork as you can for your lesson while you’re at home, at the park, or out doing errands.  That way, when you’re at the pool, ready to start the lesson, you can use more of your valuable pool time just for learning and practicing, instead of for explaining.

Structure the Swimming Lesson

Each lesson should last fifteen to twenty minutes. If your child appears happy to continue and comfortable in the water—not too cold or tired—you can spend as long as half an hour on your lesson.

Stay tuned for details on each part of the structure, coming next week. Tomorrow’s Friday, though, and Friday is time to play.

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The Hidden Flaw in Most Kids’ Swimming Lessons

Most swimming lessons have an important flaw that isn’t obvious. It’s something that you can easily avoid when you’re teaching your own kids to swim. It has everything to do with the school’s convenience and your convenience and nothing to do with the best way for kids to learn to swim. It can make the difference between your kids being willing to hop into the pool with big, goofy smiles and their whining at the mention of a lesson.

What Is This Disastrous Flaw?

Simple as it might sound, commercial swimming lessons are too long. I’ve never found one shorter than half an hour, and most are forty-five minutes or even an hour long. That’s way too long for kids.

How Long Swimming Lessons Should Last and Why

Each lesson should last fifteen to twenty minutes. If your kids seem happy to keep going and look comfortable in the water—not too cold or tired—you can spend as long as half an hour on your lesson, but that’s the exception, not the rule.

Here are the problems with longer lessons:

  1. Kids get cold. It’s one thing if they’re driving their own agenda. If they’re engaged in a rousing game of Marco Polo, they might not care that their lips have turned blue, but if you’re trying to teach them to swim, their discomfort will make it hard for your kids to have fun and retain new information.
  2. Kids get tired. It’s exhausting to practice a new physical skill. It taxes the body and the mind. A kid who might run around the park at top speed for a couple of hours in a row is using muscles in new and different ways when he’s learning to swim. He’s also having to focus on each move his body makes.

Ideally, you should work on teaching your kids to swim in short, frequent bursts. A few lessons a day at fifteen minutes each works great if you have your own pool and a wide open summer with nothing but time.

Even if that ideal isn’t practical for you, keeping lessons short and frequent—fitting in a few a week if possible—will benefit you and your kids. Your kids will learn as much in fifteen minutes as they would in a half an hour or longer, and you and your kids will all be much happier.