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Time to Play! Feeling the Water

Kids learn by playing. The more you can make 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.  Helping them learn what it feels like to move in the water is critical for making their experience learning to swim as fast and easy as possible. It’s easy to make it fun. Try these experiments for teaching your kids how it feels to move in the water.

What does being in the water feel like? Does it feel like flying? Like being an astronaut? Like going down a slide? Like jumping in a bouncy house? Like swinging on a swing? Like riding a bike? You can build a whole session of imaginative play around any one of these ideas.

You’ll have so much fun that nobody will realize you’re gaining body knowledge that’s key to learning to swim. It won’t feel like a swimming lesson. It will feel like a bonus at the end of the swimming lesson. In reality, though, it might be the most important swimming skill you teach all day.

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Teaching Kids to Feel the Water: Stage 2

Once your kids have played with moving their bodies in the water and focusing on what that feels like, you can move into deeper water in the next swimming lesson. What do you do once you’re in deeper water, and how do you keep them feeling confident and expand on this swimming skill?

Stage 2 of Teaching Kids to Get a Feel for the Water

While you hold your child, lower your body into the water or move into the deeper water in the swimming pool, where you can still stand comfortably, so that the water is up to your shoulders. Make sure that you keep your child’s face level with your own to keep from accidentally getting water into his nose or mouth. Walk around in the water so that your child feels the flow of water around his body.

In this swimming lesson, experiment with different ways of moving your arms and legs through the water. Make big splashes. Make little splashes. You can do this while you’re holding him or while he sits on the swimming pool steps.

Once your child is confident in the water while you’re holding him close, create a bit of distance between your bodies and practice what you’ve already learned that way. Play with bouncing in the water so that your child starts to develop a sense of his own buoyancy and balance in the water. You can progressively move your bodies farther apart until you’re holding your child just under the arms or by the hands. You’re also teaching him to be confident on his own in the water. You can combine this with practicing getting into the pool.

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Teaching Kids to Feel the Water: Stage 1

Now that you understand the importance of teaching kids how it feels to move their bodies in the water, it’s time to do it. Here’s how.

Stage 1 of Teaching Kids to Get a Feel for the Water

Before you even get into the pool, you and your child can start this swimming lesson. You can play with your hands in the water to get a sensual feel for how the body and water move together. You can do this in the bathtub or even using a big pot of water on the kitchen table.

Push against the water with your palm. Then slice through it with the side of your hand like a karate chop. Feel the difference. Expand your exploration of movement through the water to larger parts of the body—the arm, the leg. (You’re probably going to need the tub for the larger parts of the body, unless you’ve got really big pots in your kitchen.)

Try pushing and pulling through the water with fingers spread apart and again with fingers tightly together. Use a cupped palm and a flat palm. Discuss how these movements feel. Discuss their effect on the water. Which movements are harder and which are easier? Which move the water more? Which make bigger splashes?

If your kids have been playing in the bathtub or are already comfortable moving around in the pool with you, these feelings will be familiar to then. Practicing this swimming skill is about focusing and being aware of what they’re experiencing.

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The Most Important Swimming Skill You’ve Never Heard Of

Without this skill, there’s no way your kids will learn to swim, but it’s not a skill we tend to talk about teaching or learning in a swimming lesson. What is this critical skill?

A Feel for the Water

The one thing that will contribute the most to your child’s learning to swim is his development of a feel for the water. Awareness of how his body feels in the water and reacts to the water and how the water reacts to his body is the foundation of every skill your child needs to learn in order to be water safe.

In the water, your child’s balance will be different than it is on land. Instead of feeling his center of gravity, he’ll feel a center of buoyancy. Instead of feeling a sense of easy movement through space, he’ll feel a sense of resistance. Instead of pushing forward to move forward, he’ll push backwards to move forward. Explicitly exploring and developing awareness of all of these differences will help your child learn each skill more quickly and effectively.

Most swimming lesson plans don’t explicitly teach this skill, but focusing on it can speed your kids’ progress in all of the other swimming skills they need to learn to be water safe. So how do you teach your kids this critical swimming skill? Tune in tomorrow.