Teaching your child to swim?

[GirlWithTheMouseyHair]

3.5yr old DS has finally overcome his fear of swimming and now wants to learn. Trouble is all classes near us start while we're away and next set of lessons don't start til September.

We've started going to a local pool together once a week and I'm trying to encourage him to kick with his legs while I support his body. Is that basically all there is to it? Any tips on what I should do to start do to "teach" him?

Have you got a tummy band or a noddle/woggle. Noddles are great as they can be used in so many different ways, on front under arms, tied up as kick board, on back over the head. I think the best thing is to go regularly, my DS does have lessons but we also go ourselves quite a bit.

Do you mean those long floating things? They have then available at the pool to use - er how do you use them?!

DH takes our 3.5 DD. She wear armbands and at first tucked a long float so it was under her arms and across her chest. She could swim around supported by the float. When she was a bit more confident she stopped swimming with the float and started to paddle her arms instead. Now she swims around the pool with just her armbands and doesn't like DH to help her! I suppose for us next step will be no armbands.

Just go to the pool and go with the flow. He will soon pick it up.

I'd go out on a limb and say that there is a LOT more to teaching a child to swim than just encouraging them to float.

All three of my kids swim and have been through lessons. I run a swim club. IMO I think that you shoul start by teaching your child basic safety rules around the pool. How to enter the pool and more importantly, how to climb out safely - all children should be able to pull themself out of the pool without having to rely on steps and should slide into the water - first sitting on their bottom, rolling over onto their tummy and then sliding into the water. The next thing would to teach your child to blow bubbles with their face in the water - there are lots of games you can do to encourage this. At the same time - you could let your child float around in good quality armbands. If the child is not water-safe, don't leave them unattended with a noodle - even for a second, there is nothing more confidence destroying for a young swimmer than falling off the noodle. If you are there a noodle can be a great tool - get your child to straddle the noodle and play horsey games etc.

A good swimming teacher is so important to teach a child stroke, do stroke correction etc, so definitely consider signing up for those classes.

IME - The quickest way to get a child swimming is frequent visits to the pool. Here in Aus we have a pool - my kids swim every day in summer and all learned to swim confidently from a very young age. DD was swimming on her own and diving before she was 2 (she was also having lessons though).

HTH

Awesome, thanks all!

I feel such a muppet forking out for lessons when he was 3months then not continuing

He surprised me by getting out the pool on his own, I'll do getting into the pool with him tomorrow and if he's happy blowing bubbles. He's quite clued up on pool safety