As a family, we spent an absolute fortune on swimming lessons when my kids were younger. I found it hard to see any actual difference in their ability to swim after a couple of dozen lessons.
I’m not sure if it was the way they were taught that my children found difficult to follow, or whether they were just not interested, but we gave up and just went swimming ourselves for years. Swimming aids are great for boosting confidence in the water and we used a few different options from floats to noodles to get their confidence in the water.
When were on holiday and in Aberdeenshire, we decided to book eldest and littlest in for intensive swimming lessons. Middler is at special school and they have swimming lessons weekly there, so it seemed pointless to expose him to more lessons that he was going to find difficult to follow. My brief to the staff was that I didn’t care if my kids could swim “properly.” I just wanted them to be able to keep their heads above water and be able to breathe if they landed out of their depth in a pool, river or anywhere else with some water they could land in.
It took a while, but by the end of the first week, they were managing to hold their heads up and take a breath which was all I really wanted to be able to happen. It’s all very well being able to swim underwater, but it isn’t any use if they can’t breathe.
My kids go through swimming googles like nobodys business. They have a bad habit of leaving them lying in changing rooms or forgetting to pick them up when they leave the pool. It’s probably just as well there is a great range of fun kids swimming goggles from Zoggs so we can just go have some more. I’ve learned to always keep a spare pair or two in our swimming bags, but for some reason, we always seem to run out of them very quickly.
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