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Backtrack to Move Forward When You’re Teaching Your Kids to Swim

How can going backwards help you move forward when you’re teaching your kids to swim?

It reinforces what they’ve learned and gives them the opportunity to deepen their understanding of the swimming skill you’re working on. It also prepares them for learning the next skill without the awkwardness of not fully understanding what’s come before.

I discussed the importance of reviewing in an earlier post. Here are some steps to take to make reviewing work for you.

Set Your Expectations

Don’t expect your child to pick up where you left off at the end of the last lesson. Backtrack a bit and work up to the skills your child was working on at the end of the last lesson. If there are skills your child has already mastered, you don’t need to work on them in every lesson.

Where to Start

Start your review at the very beginning of the previous lesson’s new material and spend five to ten minutes practicing it. If your child feels really confident after the first five minutes, you can move on. If he still seems tentative, use more of your lesson on review.

Let Your Kids Riff

Try having your child experiment with doing the skill in different ways and comparing the results. Ask him to point out what he thinks works the best. Steer him away from unsafe or ineffective movements.

Play!

Ask your child how he thinks things are going. After some practice, make the skill a vehicle for play.

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Why the Wrong Kind of Praise Can Be Worse Than None at All When You’re Teaching Your Kids to Swim

Providing your kids with support each step of the way when you’re teaching them to swim can help them relax enough to move with patience and precision instead of frenetic energy. Generic praise isn’t enough, though. It can even be counterproductive. So how do you give effective praise?

Use what you know about your child when you’re teaching him to swim. Some kids respond well to frequent reinforcement. Others want you to keep out of their way. You know your child best. If you sense that he’s confused, frustrated, or distracted, help him regain his focus by giving him feedback.

Be specific and constructive when you’re praising your child’s progress. General feedback such as “you’re doing great” actually makes kids insecure about what they’re doing. If they know they’re doing great, but they don’t know how or why, they tend to be afraid that they’ll fail.

Instead, make your feedback as precise as you can. For example:

Instead of:

  • Great job!

Try saying:

  • I really like how hard you’re trying.
  • You’re doing a really good job of flicking your foot when you kick.

The first kind of praise, the generic “Great job!” kind, doesn’t give your child any information about how to keep getting positive feedback from you. Specific praise gives him a way to duplicate his success and feel good about his efforts. The better he feels about learning to swim, the more he’ll want to get into the pool for the next swimming lesson, and the more fun you’ll have teaching him to swim.

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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.

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What You Don’t Know about Reviewing That Will Change the Way You Think about Teaching Forever

Whether you’re teaching your kids to swim or teaching them long division, you’re going to spend a lot of time reviewing things you’ve already covered. It’s easy to feel like you’re spinning your wheels when you’re reviewing, but there’s something you should know that will change the way you think about teaching forever.

What You Don’t Know about Reviewing That Will Change the Way You Think about Teaching Forever

Reviewing is the heart of the lesson. This is so important that I’ll say it again: reviewing is the heart of the lesson. The first time your child is exposed to a new skill, he only scratches its surface. When you’re teaching your child to swim, he has to listen to you, watch you, and feel his own body, all while trying to interpret your feedback and the feedback he’s getting from his body and the water. It’s a big job, and it’s a lot to process. Not all of that processing is going to take place in the pool.

After you teach your kids a new swimming skill and get out of the pool, they’ll rest and play and do other things, but they’re still thinking about the skill you introduced. They’re still getting insights into how it worked. They’re still analyzing what was going on in the pool. A whole bunch of the learning of the new skill takes place after the lesson is over. They might even dream about it!

Don’t be disappointed if the bulk of your swimming lesson is dedicated to review. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s going to help your kids really get it.