Caden Learns to Swim

This post is all about a boy I am currently teaching. His name is Caden and he is seven years old. Caden took swim lessons at a facility for almost one year and could still not swim on his back (at all) nor could he swim more than two feet on his front. His mom decided that the way he was being taught was just not right for him, so she came to me.

In our first lesson, I started with teaching him how to safety turn. This is something I have all of my students learn on how to get into the water, no matter how old they are. A safety turn is when the student puts both hands on the wall and doesn’t let go while he or she turns her body into the water. This is good to teach because when kids do this enough it turns into habit and then they are never surprised when they can’t touch the ground because they are still holding the wall. I then did a quick evaluation of his swimming skills. After that, I started with teaching him to swim on his front. I had him put a noodle under his armpits and reminded him to keep his feet on top of the water. The reason Caden can’t swim more than two feet by himself is because his feet are below him and not behind him when he swims. This just means he doesn’t move forward at all and then his face goes under because he loses momentum. I also gave Caden a kick board to use. We went back and forth from end to end just practicing kicking. He eventually got that his feet needed to stay up high! He began moving very well with the kick board, which was great because when I first gave him the kick board he was at a standstill. He wouldn’t move unless I pulled him.

In the next few lessons I started taking the noodle away from him. I continued to remind him to keep his feet on top of the water so he could propel forward. A fun game I play with kids when I want them to swim on their own and they aren’t fond of the idea is Tag. I tell them that I bet they can’t tag me and start to “run away.” The kids get very excited about the idea of tagging the teacher, so they push off the wall at full force and race after me. This is exactly what I did with Caden and for the first time he swam ten feet all by himself. By the fourth lesson Caden was able to swim fifteen feet, while trying to tag me.

I also worked on Caden’s back with him. Caden sinks automatically when he is on his back because he resorts to the position of “sitting in a chair” in order to keep his head out of the water. I taught him belly up and head back. A great tip with teaching back swimming is first teaching floating. I tell the kids to look like a starfish with legs and arms out along with a Santa belly. When the kids focus on making their stomachs big it forces them to arch their back, which helps them float. Also, a great tip for helping kids look up when on their back is asking them what color your eyes are. I stood just far enough back that Caden had to put his head into the water up to his hairline in order to see my eye color. I also started with holding his shoulders, and as he got stronger I moved to his arms, and then finally his hands. When you hold a child’s hands while he or she is floating, that means he or she is just about ready to do it all on his or her own. You can play a little by letting go and then grabbing their hands again to see if they can do it all by themselves. Caden was able to back float by himself after six lessons for five full seconds. That was a huge improvement for him!

All children will have different needs when it comes to teaching swimming. That is why it is so important to modify lessons and not teach them exactly the same to every child. Caden’s right eye is smaller than his left eye. He also can’t see very much at all through his right eye, which means he counts deeply on his left eye to see. He also hates when water gets in his right eye, because it irritates it. I teach most of my students to squeeze their eyes really tight when they get wet, blink hard, and then open them. This means that if they were to ever fall in, and they were too frazzled to wipe their eyes, they would know how to open them. A lot of my students are able to do this, however because Caden has difficulties with his right eye, he was not. Instead I taught him how to wipe his eyes using only one hand. Most beginner swimmers try to use both hands when water gets in them, but they are not strong enough to use only their legs which means they end up sinking and rewetting their eyes. When you teach a child to use only one hand (and it doesn’t matter which hand that is) then they are able to use the other to continue swimming. This can be a hard concept for younger students, so I always tell the parents to practice it in the bathtub or shower. Whenever he or she needs to wipe his or her face, he or she can only do it with one hand. Over time and a lot of practice, Caden got the hang of wiping his eyes with one hand and swimming with the other.

Caden has come a long way! He can do so much, even after so few lessons. When you teach a child how to swim it involves modification, patience, and fun! 

Alvin the Little Fish

I have taught children of all different ages and abilities to swim. My favorite lesson was with a student named Alvin. I taught Alvin for three years and in those three years he won most improved out of all of my lessons. Alvin has high functioning Autism. He can speak, walk, and move like a normal person, but the things he says are very random and not complete sentences. He is fully capable of understanding what you say to him, but he struggles with expressing his own emotions in return. Doctors had told his mom he would never be able to understand how to swim. They told her that even though he can understand when people talk to him, it would still be too hard to swim.

Alvin was seven years old when he first came to me. He swam vertically and would instantly sink when I let go of him. I had to come up with different ways of saying things to him to help him comprehend the ideas of swimming. It was easier to teach Alvin to swim on his front than his back because he already naturally swam on his front. I would just say “feet up” or “kick the top of the water” and he would understand what I meant. He would also repeat every phrase I said over and over to himself. Something that I noticed with Alvin was that when he was in the shallow end he would walk instead of swim. To help him to learn to swim on his own, I would take him to the deep end where he could not touch. This was definitely a challenge for him, but it is how he learned to swim! After a year of lessons, Alvin was able to swim 25 yards on his own. That is one full length of the pool. Two years later, he was able to swim 200 yards on his front without stopping. It took Alvin a long time to swim those 200 yards, but he could do it, and that was what was most important.

When Alvin first learned to swim on his back, he was petrified. He would scream “NO” at me and lift his head up. He would also position his body like he was sitting in a chair. One day when I told him to swim on his back, I said, “Alvin, look up at the sky and pretend that you are sleeping.” He repeated that phrase over and over again and relaxed for the first time on his back. He was no longer sitting in a chair, his back was straight. I was able to hold his shoulders and tread backwards while he looked up and kicked his feet. He eventually started moving his hands on his own. Instead of doing elementary backstroke, his hands moved in a sculling motion, which was okay because he was propelling himself. I was then able to let go of him and he could swim on his back across the pool by himself.

After I taught Alvin to swim on his front and back confidently, I began to teach him to tread. I took a noodle and put it between his legs like a horse. I told him to stay still and keep his head up while still kicking his feet. I eventually took the noodle away from him and he was able to tread all by himself! We started with treading for only five seconds and we made our way up to two minutes. The only problem was that I had to count down or he would stop. That means that if I wanted him to tread for a minute I would have to count down from sixty. Sometimes he would count with me, but most of the time he would just listen. If I paused too long or stopped at any time, he would stop treading so I had to make sure that I stayed consistent when counting.

I also taught Alvin how to jump in on his own. This was a challenge because he was scared. I first started in the shallow end where he could touch. I took both of his hands in mine and would count to three and then say “jump!” He would just step in and it was more of me pulling him in then him jumping in. He didn’t really understand jumping into a pool. I had practice jumping in place on the pool deck for him to understand it. I would say “jump” to him and show him how to jump. I then held his hands and helped him jump up and down. After he got jumping in place, I took him back to the shallow end and he got it! He held my hands and jumped in. Alvin was soon able to jump into the shallow end without me holding his hands. I continued to move him farther and farther down to where he eventually couldn’t touch. After one year of consistent lessons, Alvin was finally able to jump into the deep end and swim back to the wall without any help.

Once Alvin was able to swim, jump, and tread confidently he was ready to take the “deep end test.” This was the test to determine whether or not a child under eighteen years old could swim in the deep end by his or herself. The test was to start in the shallow end, swim across the pool to the deep end, stop before the wall and tread for one minute, then climb out and jump in.  I told Alvin he could do it and swam next to him while he tried the deep end test for the first time. I had to remind him to not let his feet touch the ground, because that would mean he didn’t pass. After a few attempts, Alvin passed the deep end test consistently! Alvin was officially an independent swimmer and I was proud of him. 

Bye Bye Fear

Teaching an adult who is scared of water may be rather difficult. Some adults that can’t swim had some sort of traumatic experience at some point in their life to make them scared of the water. For others there was not a traumatic experience but rather it is a fear of the unknown.  They had never tried to swim nor had they ever had a want to swim. Now, many adults will decide they want to learn for many reasons. One being, their children know how to swim and they want to be able to confidently take them to water parks and such. Another reason might be that they are tired of watching everyone around them have fun in the water and they can’t enjoy it themselves. I have personally heard many different types of reasons and fears, but no matter what it is I still do my best to help them learn to swim confidently.

I have taught quite a few adult private lessons. One of my favorites was a woman named Kerri. Kerri had an accident when she was a young girl where she was pushed into the deep end of a pool. She didn’t know how to swim and ended up sinking straight to the bottom. Kerri was terrified as she never took in a breath of air before her head went under. Luckily for her, there was a parent nearby that saw and quickly went under to retrieve her. She would not step foot in another pool after that, whether she could touch or not. With Kerri, I had to be very patient. I could not push her too much or she would lose faith in herself and give up. We started on the stairs. I let her sit on the top stair and I just talked to her about things that didn’t relate to swimming. She had two children, Kevin and Lacy, so we talked about them. I told her that as she got comfortable to continue moving down the stairs. As we talked, I watched her scoot her body down step by step. We were in the shallow end or three feet deep. The water was just above my waste and about the same height on Kerri. It took Kerri a full twenty minutes to get into the water and where she was standing. That was a lot of progress. She had not been in a pool since she was a little girl. We took the last ten minutes to work on paddling her hands in the water while standing.

The next few lessons were very similar to the first. She took her time getting in, and then we would end with either paddling or bending at the knee to get more of her body wet. Once she was a little more comfortable, I was able to get her to walk around the shallow end. She would walk back and forth from five feet to three feet. She was improving so much and I could see that her fear was getting a little crack in it. I told her it was time to start getting her face wet. We would do mouth bubbles and I let her plug her nose to get her eyes wet. It took more lessons to learn to blow bubbles from her nose, but she did get it!

I always start with learning how to swim on your front when teaching someone who has a fear of water. People tend to be more comfortable on their front because they feel like they have more control since they can see where they are going. However, we did still work on back floating. I gave her a float belt (a think piece of foam that wraps around a person’s waste) and two noodles that she held under her armpits. I had her practice on the wall first before having her try in the open shallow end. She placed her hands on the wall and slowly let her legs lift behind her. Again, this is a big step for her to lift her feet from the ground for the first time when she was so scared. I let her lift and then put her feet back down until she looked comfortable. After a few times of practicing this, we tried it off of the wall. I held her hands instead of her holding the wall and we tried it a few times. She was already much more confident in herself, and even though she would never admit it and would say things like I can’t  or it’s too hard I remained positive and told her she could.

Once Kerri was able to successfully pick her feet off of pool ground and place them back down, we worked on kicking. She first sat on the wall and kicked her feet. She worked on keeping her legs straight. New swimmers tend to kick their legs like they are riding a bike and then don’t move anywhere. They don’t move because their legs are too bent and they aren’t pushing enough water. When she got the hang of kicking with straight legs and only a slight bend at the knee, she practiced in the water on the wall. We then moved to me holding her hands while she lifted her feet and kicked. I would walk her around the shallow end as she kicked her feet. I would also help her move her hands in a paddling motion. We did this for a few full lessons before I started taking away parts of her floatation devices. I first took away one noodle, next came the other noodle, and eventually the float belt. We also continued to work on floating and kicking on her back as much as she hated it, because it was something that she needed to know. Soon enough, Kerri was able to swim across the shallow end without me even touching her. I waited until she was completely comfortable swimming in shallow water before introducing her to water where she couldn’t touch. I gave her back the float belt before having her swim across the whole pool and I made sure to stay in front of her. After a few times swimming across, I took away the float belt again and I had her swim as far as she could go without grabbing the wall.

She made it a little further each time until eventually she could make it all the way across without my help. For Kerri, it took about a year of consistent lessons for her to get that comfortable. She would also come in on her own time to practice. Kerri was very determined to overcome her fear and she did! She is one of my success stories.