Breath Control, Balance, Buoyancy How and why?

Welcome to Day 2. Ready to explore the most important building blocks in learn-to-swim? Today you’ll learn the how, when, and why’s about teaching the breath control necessary to move to submersions. So many of our parents think that submerging a baby is scary and hard. Today you will learn some of the skills to make submersions easy and simple in today's lessons. Use the turtle kickboard as your student when you practice the holds and skills.

Without a firm foundation of comfort underwater, trying to teach additional skills is rarely successful. 

Be prepared to hear the question “what would you do next” as your Trainer works to help you learn the order of the Lesson Plans! And don’t forget, you are allowed to ask questions also!

Your focuses for today will prepare you to teach the first half of each class on Day 3 of your training.

The lesson plan

• “What would you do next?”

Getting the class started

• Water Exploration
  • Step exploration for the first two minutes of class allows our babies and parents to re-acclimate to the aquatic environment. The goal is to get the baby's head and face wet often using cup work.
  • Zen sweeps are a warm-up drill for both our parents and their babies. We’re looking for the parents to learn long, slow sweeps, allowing the water to do the work. .
  • Zen sweeps also bring the baby into a swimming mindset rather than a walking mindset when they feel their buoyancy in the water as they acclimate to the aquatic environment.
• Introductions
  • EVERY class we want to ask the parent's name and the student’'s name and age. Other parents love to hear the answers. Many lifelong friendships have been born in our pools! Is this their first child in our program? What do they hope to get out of Little Snappers? 
• Focus of the Week (FOW)
  •  Every week you are given something different to focus on at every level. It might be as simple as focusing on bubbles or getting fins on most of the students.
  • It does not necessarily mean you will change the structure of your class, you will just have parents place more attention on something specific for that day to help build on skills!

Breath Control, Balance, Buoyancy How and why?

Your goal for today will be to observe, learn, and practice drills to prepare for and teach submersions. 

When we work with new students, our first step is teaching comfort in and then under the water. We do not submerge students if it is their first or second day at HFSS (unless they are willingly going underwater by themselves). We work on building trust with the parent and letting the student get a feel for the flow of the class as we introduce water preparation work; cup work and zen sweeps.