Puddle Ducks lessons have key lifesaving and personal survival skills threaded through every lesson from our youngest babies to our older Swim Academy children.
Why do we teach water safety skills?
We teach skills through a variety of activities to ensure children know what to do if they find themselves in difficulty in the water. In teaching these skills to children from as young an age as possible, they become second nature, and if the worst was to happen and they were to fall into water, they would instinctively know what to do.
Some of the activities we teach throughout our programmes include:
- Turning in the water and reaching to hold onto the wall/float
- Call out for help in the water
- Rolling off the float and re-surfacing to hold onto the float
- Kicking to the surface
- Blowing bubbles so as to not take on any water
- Crab walking along the side of the pool to safety
One key part of our lessons is teaching our Puddle Ducks the importance of safe entry and exits from the water. Learning to ‘wait’ until a parent/guardian is with them before entering water is key to keep them safe. Even our youngest babies wait for the parent to enter the pool. We also teach safe swivel entry into the pool, holding hands whilst walking down steps and waiting for parents/guardians before exiting a pool. In every programme our babies and children are not allowed into or out of the water until instructed to by the teacher.
Keeping our little ones safe around water when on holiday is always at the forefront of every parents mind, and so Puddle Ducks HQ have put together this blog on holiday swimming tips.
https://www.puddleducks.com/blog/holiday-swimming-tips
Puddle Ducks Pyjama Week:
3 times a year Puddle Duck hold Pyjama weeks. These are dedicated weeks where children (and carers!) wear their pyjamas to their lessons. Throughout these lessons our focus is on water safety and teaching our children (and parents too!) the importance of being safe around water, what to do if the worst was to happen.
During these weeks we encourage parents and children to wear their pyjamas. This gives swimmers an opportunity to experience the feeling of being in the water with their clothes on. We do not positively encourage our swimmers to jump into the water whenever they can, fully clothed – quite the opposite – it is a controlled and safe environment to provide them with the opportunity to see how it would feel to be in the water, following an accidental submersion/fall into water, showing them that they can still swim and use their skills.
