Stage 3 – Keep Exploring

ADVENTURE EVEN DEEPER

When it’s time to go to the deep end, your child should already be able to confidently navigate the water.

Can they rotate? Tread water? Float on their back?

LET’S KICK IT

Treading water is an important skill. It helps keep us upright in the water. There’s different styles and loads of ways you can build up that strength too.

• Flutter Kick

• Frog Kick

• Egg Beater

• Sculling High Knees

Try with one hand out of the water, then both. Get out the stop watch and see how long your little one can go for. Can they beat their own record?

For some extra fun, see if you can play catch together at the same time!

BREATHING

We’re not all underwater creatures by nature. But we can learn to be! With goggles on, first, we need to learn how to breathe out through our nose, stay relaxed and avoid discomfort.

Hold your breath, go under the water together and demonstrate slowly breathing out through your nose. The bubbles will indicate what you’re doing. This will help them to better understand how to pace their breathing and relax more underwater. We don’t want to be all tense and bottled up down there. It’s for adventure after all!

GOING UNDERWATER

Going underwater is all about collecting treasure! You can put some dive sticks on the pool floor and your little explorer can dive down to retrieve them.

Get creative and start building circuits for them to link up their skills. There could be a combination of toys on the surface and sticks underneath the water they need to retrieve and place on the side. Try to include turns, floats and catching as you look to increase the challenge. ‘When learning strokes, try not to manually manipulate your child’s limbs. The more they’re able to interpret themselves, the more they’ll learn and the safer they’ll be.