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How to Teach Your Kids to Swim: 4 Keys to Creating Atmosphere

How you set the stage for your swimming lessons will have a huge impact on how your kids feels about learning to swim, and your kids’ attitudes will determine whether they’re willing and able to learn. So how do you create an atmosphere that sets you both up for success when you’re teaching your kids to swim?

4 Keys to Creating Atmosphere

A big part of teaching happens before you open your mouth or demonstrate a single swimming skill. It starts with creating an atmosphere that makes your kids receptive to learning. Imagine the look your kids get on their face when they’re watching a clown. (Not a scary clown. A good, funny clown.) That’s the kind of excitement and anticipation you want them to have when you’re teaching them to swim.

Relax.

Plan your swimming lesson for a time when you’re not rushed or tense. Your kids can sense tension in your face and body. They pick it up and become tense, too. You need to be truly relaxed before you start to teach. If you’re not, step back to think happy thoughts or postpone your lesson until you can have the attitude you need to make the teaching and learning experience fun for everyone.

Project confidence, calm, and enthusiasm.

Make sure those feelings come through in your voice. Don’t yell. Reassure your child with jokes, laughter and hugs. Use a patient, nurturing, positive attitude. Remind yourself that making learning to swim fun isn’t only an end in itself; it’s also an important part of setting the stage for deep, thorough learning.

Having your own emotions on an even keel will also help you respond to your child. If your child is afraid or nervous, point out how close those feelings are to excitement. The way you frame his experience for him will help shape how he perceives it. The physical sensations for a little kid trying to go to sleep the night before his birthday aren’t far removed from the ones he feels when he’s getting ready to try something new. Remind him about some of his favorite activities and how there was a moment in his life when he hadn’t tried those activities yet. This could be the moment right before discovering a new favorite.

Be trustworthy. Be honest.

Let your child know what to expect, and follow through. If you say you won’t dunk him, don’t dunk him. Your child needs to be able to trust you in the water so that he’ll have enough confidence to take the risks learning to swim entails. If you break that trust, it will take a long time to regain it. It can make learning to swim very difficult, possibly even leading to a lifelong fear of the water. If you’re a trustworthy teacher, your child will trust that he’s safe in the water.

Tame your expectations.

Don’t expect your child to do it perfectly. Don’t expect him to be fast or coordinated. Don’t expect him to progress without setbacks or plateaus. If you start to get frustrated, take a break. You’re not going to teach effectively when you’re frustrated, your child won’t learn anything, and you’ll transfer your lousy mood and tension to him. Better to hop out of the pool for a few minutes and lie on your backs together watching for animals in the puffy clouds floating by.

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Time to Play! Kicking

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. One of the skills that will help your kids learn to be stable in the water is kicking. One beautiful thing about kicking is that you can laugh while you practice, and when you play this game, you and your kids will do lots of laughing.

Have your kids kick while you tow them. Let them determine how fast you go based on how fast they kick. Can they kick so fast that you get out of breath? So fast that you can’t keep up? Can they keep a straight face while you’re huffing and puffing? Can you?

Tow them in swerving, curving paths from one side of the pool to the other. Tow them in a fast, straight line.

Finish by hopping out of the pool and flopping down on the grass on your backs and watching the clouds go by. You’ll all need the rest. Learning to kick is tiring, and so is all that towing.

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How to Teach Your Kids to Swim—Part 1

Great teachers have fabulous insights into how kids think and feel, deep creative reservoirs to draw from when they plan lessons, keen instincts for interacting with kids and modifying lessons on the fly to make the most of each teachable moment, and years of experience. As your child’s first teacher, you’ve already got these insights, creative reservoirs, instincts, and experience. You can make the most of your experience teaching your child to swim by honing and expanding on what you’ve already got. But how?

Understanding

You already know your kids better than their other teachers ever will. If you’ve read the posts about how kids’ bodies make a difference in how they learn to swim, about kids’ sensory experiences of the water, about kids’ feelings and motivation, and about how they perceive success, you’ve already heightened your insights into how kids think and feel when it comes to learning to swim. In future posts, I’ll be addressing kids’ developmental levels at different ages. Understanding how kids respond to the stress of learning to swim will help you teach them to swim.

Creativity

Every Friday, I’ll post ideas for plumbing the depths of your creative well (and lots of ideas for when you feel like your well has run dry). You already have experience working with, playing with, and teaching your child.

Fundamentals

Here’s where experienced teachers have an advantage. They know how to structure lessons, interact with kids to optimize how those lessons work, and adapt when there’s an opportunity to get more out of a lesson. That’s what I’ll be addressing in next week’s posts.

You can teach your child to be water safe in a way that’s fun for your kids and for you and intuitive for your kids. In order to do it, you need to create an atmosphere that makes it easy to teach and easy to learn. You need to use a teaching style that supports that atmosphere. You need to structure lessons in a way that helps your child learn. You need to be attuned to your child. You need to make the most of your time in the water. You can also bring the lessons out of the pool in ways that a hired swimming teacher can’t.

Next week, I’ll start by diving into how to create a great atmosphere for teaching your kids to swim. Tomorrow’s Friday, though, and that means I’ll take a break to give you some ideas for play. Happy splashing!

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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.