After registering for your summer swim lessons, you may be wondering what you can do over the next few months to prepare. There are many ways you can help your child (or yourself) be ready and excited for lessons, even when it’s not very warm outside.
- Start talking about swimming and water safety.
If you’ve taken lessons before, talk about what your child remembers from their previous experiences. Ask what they’re most excited about, and what they want to learn this year. Show them videos from their previous lessons and talk about them. If you don’t have any videos, it can be fun to look at videos of swimming online. Older kids might enjoy watching videos of Olympic swimmers so they can learn what they can work towards!
- Practice the skills they’ve already learned (or to begin to introduce them to the basics).
Simple skills, such as blowing bubbles, putting their face underwater, and back floats, can all be practiced in the bath tub! More complex strokes and kicks can be practiced outside of the water. You can make a game out of this by turning on some music and making the arm and leg movements into a dance!
- An additional exercise that can be beneficial for swimmers of all ages is visualization.
Younger kids can be encouraged to use their imagination to picture themselves swimming and having fun at their lesson, creating a story about it. Another way to do this is to have them choose their favorite doll or stuffed animal and pretend to give them a swim lesson. Older kids and adults can especially benefit from visualization, and it can really help to calm their fears and gain confidence. The key is that they must imagine themselves having a successful lesson: achieving their goals, being brave, and feeling proud of their accomplishments.
These are just some of the many ways to begin preparing for summer lessons. We hope that you and your children are as excited as we are!
