Children thrive on routine, be it a nightly bedtime ritual, homework and snack after school or 30 minutes practicing piano each day. And just like with any new skill, they need to practice and repeat for more than just a few months out of the year in order to be fully competent.
Like piano, swimming is a skill that can be compounded and constantly improved upon. At Little Otter, swimmers receive instruction year-round, which allows them to fall into the routine of always going to swim practice no matter what the season. Children are given the opportunity to learn, practice, play and repeat all year long. Because they are able to build upon their skill set and compound their basic knowledge, they are constantly improving, even with introductory-level skills.
We know it may not sound like material for a first lesson, learning to be comfortable in the water is a great place to begin. Familiarity with the water, while innate in many infants, can sometimes be intimidating to children and even adults. By getting used to being wet, children can learn to adapt to their new surroundings and be comfortable when learning more advanced techniques. And because swimming is progressive in nature, each lesson builds upon the previous and sets a foundation for the next. Just as you would have a child take piano lessons for more than just one year, swimming has many levels that a child can master year after year.
Our Little Otter instructors teach the same skill through multiple avenues, including blowing bubbles and going under water to introduce breath control. While retrieving a diving stick or swimming through a ring, our little swimmers don’t always realize they are practicing the skills they will need for later. They learn to blend fun with friends and instructors while simultaneously practicing the same basic skills they learn at the very beginning.
Where Little Otter is different, however, is that we are a year-round swimming school. Swimmers don’t leave the pool in August only to forget everything they learned over the nine-month break. Instead, they routinely practice their skills until they are able to learn new ones.
We know not every child will go on to swim for a recreation league or high school team, but one year he or she may learn to float on their back and another, they can swim all four strokes. This constant improvement is the result of year-round swimming. Depending on how long and how far your child wants to go with swimming, it can be a lifelong hobby.
You may have noticed your son or daughter thriving on a schedule at home. They know when bedtime approaches, they must brush their teeth and put on their pajamas. They have practiced this every single day and it is now second nature. The same goes for learning to swim. Practicing blowing bubbles or swimming freestyle eventually becomes something kids can do on their own. Who knows, you may see your son or daughter swim the breaststroke just for fun with friends, not even realizing they were learning this new stroke a few months back. We’ve all heard the saying, practice makes perfect, so help your child become a strong swimmer by allowing them to reap the positive benefits of repetition and routine practice.
You probably remember that one great teacher from your past. Perhaps it was a soccer coach, a third-grade teacher or the high school counselor who believed in you when you weren’t sure of yourself. No matter who your childhood mentors were, you will always remember your favorite teacher and what they did for you. It is the hope of Little Otter that our teachers will impact each and every student with life-saving skills and rank as one of those memorable teachers in your child’s life.
Practicing patience, safety and most of all fun, Little Otter teachers are trained in early childhood development. Each instructor completes Otter University, where they learn the best practices for swimming lesson philosophies and techniques. Not until they have completed 40 hours of classroom, in-water instruction, and shadowing experienced teachers, will an instructor be given their own class.
Separated by age and later skill sets and technique, Little Otter swimming classes cater to the development of children of all ages. Our instructors recognize that infants behave and learn completely differently from a five year old. That one is obvious but they also understand the difference a 4 year old and a 5 year old and how those 2 children learn best. They teach age-appropriate skills, allowing children to develop and learn at levels that provide the greatest opportunity for successful swimming.
While the training and experience are crucial components for effective teaching, truly impacting a swimmer cannot be done without a genuine affection for children. Little Otter instructors delight in seeing children smile, laugh, swim and most important, improve and complete each skill they are taught. The earliest classes involve parents and their infants, who the instructors enjoy having at their side. Older students are without parents and must form a tight bond with their swim teacher.
Learning to trust their instructors doesn’t always come easy for children, however. The staff at Little Otter understands this is a delicate relationship and therefore focuses their efforts on bonding with swimmers through patience and positive reinforcement. It is the love and affection for children and childhood development that inspires students as well as creates an award-winning staff.
Little Otter instructors Laurel Routledge, Yancy Guzman, Christl Ray, Rachel Ingram, Richard Micham, Robin Varner and Victoria Gordon-Damaso recently received the Outstanding Teacher award from the United States Swim School Association. The awards are chosen from national entries among the Association’s members. Our award-winning Little Otter instructors, who absolutely love the children in their classes, teach with the mindset that loving a child equates to learning. Therefore, their classes produce skilled swimmers at every level.
If you are looking for a unique way to bond with your child or introduce them to the teacher that will stay in their memory for a lifetime, check out Little Otter Swim School and our year-round swimming lessons.
It is amazing to see how life changes after the birth of a child. Juggling work, carpools, dinners and extracurricular activities can make you question why there aren’t more hours in the day. Parents often forget to slow down and remember the magic that happens when you bond with a child. In fact, spending time just talking, touching and smiling with a young one can significantly and positively affect their development. So why not look for a fun, new way to connect with your baby?
Little Otter Swim School offers swimming lessons starting at six months. This magical time in a child’s life is when their curiosity is peaking and their senses are in overdrive. You are their hero and most trusted soul. As their primary caregiver(s), you have a unique opportunity to bond with your baby in water as you teach them safety and water familiarity while having fun splashing around.
Little Otter’s infant swimming lessons are a creative and exciting way to add to your child’s development. Familiarizing them with water and teaching water safety can never be taught too early. Through songs, games and lots of parent interaction, infant swimming lessons are an essential tool for establishing a strong swimming foundation. These basic skills will further your child’s knowledge base needed for advanced swimming. Many, if not all, of the skills learned will be built upon in later lessons. Children will be introduced to water orientation, floating, breathing, gentle underwater submersion, back floating and kicking. There are no more than six babies per instructor and parents are allowed in the water with their child at all times. In fact, parent/baby interaction is essential to successful skill development.
When caring for a new baby, nothing replaces the bond that comes from skin-to-skin contact. And nowhere else can that contact be better achieved than in water. A familiar environment to infants, water provides buoyancy and comfort that is perfect for interacting with children. In addition to bonding through touch, infant swimming lessons are a perfect way to begin teaching water safety. Drowning prevention can never start too early and infant swimming lessons promote safety in and around the water. Bath time can mimic the pool and will be a safer environment for your child. Further, knowing how to swim is the one life skill that can be taught and can save your child and other children’s lives.
Just as with any motor skill or milestone, swimming skills are developed at all speeds and levels. Swimming isn’t natural to everyone, so starting early will give your child an advantage in water familiarization. Additionally, the ability to have uninterrupted time with your new baby is priceless. Laughter replaces cell phones, while happy, smiling babies are much more enjoyable than traffic and chores. Bonding with your baby in a safe, productive manner rewards not just baby but mom and dad as well.
As parents, we love to see our children learn new things and accomplish new skills. It’s part of what we feel makes us a good parent. However, often in our quest, we get caught up in thinking that sooner is better.
It’s important that in swim lessons, as in other areas of learning, that we keep our expectations realistic. Understanding how children learn and what they need is a key factor for positive healthy learning.
Children need the gift of time: Children don’t want to hurry up and learn anything. They learn best when they are discovering, exploring and moving forward at a pace that is within their comfort level. Pushing young children to reach goals before they are ready creates stress and impedes valuable learning.
Children need peaks and valleys: Sometimes there are periods when many skills are gained, followed by times when it appears that no progress is being made at all. And, sometimes skills once mastered, appear to have regressed. The brain and muscles are ‘working’ through information and taking some much needed time to get everything processed. This is a natural part of learning. Children will get the most benefit when adults recognize this and remain confident, calm and positive.
Children need the whole picture: If skill acquisition becomes the only focus, children get short changed. Young children come to swim lessons just as they are. They bring the only social skills, behavioral skills, and cognitive skills that they have, and typically, just like swimming skills, they haven’t got them mastered quite yet. Learning to take turns, follow directions, share, remember the rules, separate from Mommy, and meet new friends are all valuable and often challenging skills in and of themselves. When we are in a hurry to get children to master specific skills, we become skill oriented, and miss the opportunity to develop meaningful growth in many other areas.
As parents and teachers, one of the best things we can do is slow down and give our children the gift of time. Allowing children to learn in a way that is conducive to their developmental readiness instead of a preconceived adult time frame, ensures positive and healthy growth, as well as instills a love for learning. Adults like to “hurry up and learn”, not children. There’s a good reason why children don’t like this; it’s just plain and simple, not how they learn. Children need the gift of time.
When summer draws to a close, some children say goodbye to their swim instructors and new Little Otter friends to begin sports and music lessons or focus on school work. Parents don’t think twice about pulling their child out of swimming lessons in order to start a new activity. Yet when summer rolls around again the following year, they are startled to find their son or daughter in the same class as the previous year or slow to improve.
Retention is the key to forward progression when fine-tuning or learning any new skill. Little Otter Swim School offers year-round lessons that allow children to build upon their summer-learned foundation and continue to progress their skills. Consistency is important for children to learn to swim and for parents, it allows their swimmer to retain their skills on a more permanent basis.
Many parents enroll their student in swimming lessons at a young age to teach water safety and how to react in an emergency situation. These are definitely critical skills to learn; however, parents must also remember that children can be around water even in cooler months, such as ponds, lakes, hot tubs, bathtubs and even a back yard with an uncovered pool. Having a swimmer who takes lessons year-round provides a more robust education and higher success for knowing how to react in an emergency. Parents should also remember, swimming is one of, if not the only sport a child can learn that can literally save their lives. In fact, drowning is the fourth-leading cause of accidental death in the United States, claiming 4,000 lives annually. Approximately one-third are children under the age of 14.
At Little Otter, we practice safety on a regular basis in addition to teaching kids to swim. This in turn provides swimmers with valuable life-saving skills and a broad aquatic knowledge base. In order to ensure children’s skills are retained and not just memorized for the short-term, students must continue to swim beyond the summer months. The longer a child is away from swimming, the longer it takes him or her to work back to their initial skill level. Unfortunately, swimmers can forget these crucial life-saving and safety skills during a winter break and panic or react in a way that is counterproductive should they find themselves in a life-threatening emergency. Although every child will react differently, chances are, if the skills are ingrained in their psyche, they will respond accordingly.
Parents are also frustrated financially when they find themselves paying to bring their swimmer up to speed from a previous swim season or round of lessons. Just as with any new hobby, practice makes perfect and chances are, you would need a refresher after a long hiatus from a new sport or activity. With year-round lessons, children build upon their foundation and undergo progressive learning, which allows them to not only practice and retain their skills but also regularly improve.
But what about colds and viruses in cooler months? Contrary to popular belief, your child will not be more susceptible to colds in the winter months at swim practice. Our comfortable, 90-degree temperature waters will ensure children’s body temperatures are safe no matter what month or season. Also, keep in mind, exercise is especially beneficial for strengthening immune systems and keeping adults and children safe from illness.
Year-round swimming lessons provide several benefits to parents and children alike. They not only offer a greater overall value to your student and wallet, but they provide critical skills and opportunities for students to learn in the most quick and efficient manner. We hope to see your Little Otter this fall!
You’ve probably seen it before: parents at the pool chatting with friends who turn their back for a few seconds, when suddenly, a child is gasping for help. Instinctively, mothers and fathers will often dive in or immediately pull their child from the pool, often causing such a commotion that the child is more scared than it realized and ultimately, left with a bad feeling about the water.
It is a popular myth that by placing children in swimming classes, parents will feel a false sense of security and not pay as careful attention as if they were in the water with someone who could not swim. This leads many parents to draw the conclusion that swimming lessons to do not prevent drowning and may even promote it.
Thankfully, this is false. In fact, groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), who once concluded that children under certain ages weren’t developmentally ready for swimming lessons, have now reversed this opinion and have concluded that swimming lessons can help to increase water safety awareness and prevent drowning.
According to a 2009 study conducted by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Heath and Human Development, children who participate in formal swimming lessons are less likely to drown. The study found that among 61 children ages 1—4 who had died from drowning, only three percent had ever taken formal swimming lessons. By contrast, 26 percent of the children in the general population had received some type of formal lessons. In addition, parent interviews reflected that only five percent of the swimmers who drowned could float on their back for 10 seconds, while 18 percent of those who didn’t drown could float for at least 10 seconds.
What does all this mean? Teaching your child to swim will do a number of things, most importantly, keep them alive and safe. Swimming lessons will:
1) Educate children about water safety. Swimming lessons are designed to do more than teach stroke or breathing techniques. They also teach the importance of swimming with a buddy or parent, understanding when it’s safe to enter the water and identifying risks around the pool deck.
2) Teach them to be familiar and comfortable in both deep and shallow water. Drownings often occur when a child isn’t comfortable in water and hyperventilates or goes into panic mode. This results in swallowing water and getting tired more easily. Swimming lessons can provide simple ways for kids to retain their energy, such as floating on their back if out in a lake far from shore, treading water or even just standing up if in a shallow pool.
3) Show them how to recognize when others are in need. Advanced swimmers and even younger ones can often identify when someone is in trouble and notify an adult when a child is panicking.
The thought of drowning is scary to everyone; however, teaching your child to swim from an early age will enhance their knowledge and ability and ultimately help you enjoy the warmer months a little longer. Remember, Little Otter swimming lessons cater to the ages and ability of the swimmer. Safety is always a priority yet this does not mean that parental supervision will be unnecessary. We can never be “drownproof”, but we can always be safer around the water. It should always be a part of any time we are around water. But knowing your son or daughter can swim will ease any play day in the water.
Coming to your first swim lesson can be a very emotional time for your child. Think back to the first day you went to school or first day on a job and remember the feelings of uncertainty and insecurity. You were going to a new place with people you did not know. So if you child is a little nervous, that is perfectly understandable. This is especially true if your child is anxious around the water or has had a bad experience in the water.
Many children associate the water with having their hair washed and getting soap in their eyes. They are too young to realize that it is the soap and not the water that stings their eyes. They just know that it hurts when the water gets poured on their heads and they don’t want that to happen. They see the progression as water poured over my head, water goes in my eyes and my eyes sting.
There are a lot of things you can do at home to prepare your child for swimming lessons. The first thing is not make a big deal over coming to swim lessons. Mention it and leave it at that. Sometimes a child can get more worked up about what they imagine than what will actually occur. Start trying to make shower and bath time fun. Play lots of games in the bath. Some of these games would include pouring or sprinkling water from a toy watering can over the head. Now all these games should happen before soap or shampoo is added to the water because we want to get away from the thought that water stings the eyes.
If your child is not too excited about water being poured over their head then let them pour water over their favorite toy. Play splash games where tiny amounts of water splash into your child’s face. If your child gets water in their eyes, and start to get upset, see if you can distract them with other activities in the bath. We find that children that shower tend to be more prepared for swimming lessons compared to children who only take baths. Try distance washing their hair from having fun in the water, by making hair washing a separate time to having a bath.
One thing that can work well with a child that is apprehensive is to get to the lessons early so they can see what is going on in a swim lesson. Many times the unknown is worse than the reality. Allow extra time to get here so you come into the facility and are not rushed and stressed. Our children pick up on things like that. Check in at our customer service desk and someone will explain our routine to you.
If you would like to walk you child out to the teacher we ask you remove your shoes on deck. When you get to the teacher it usually works better to hand the child over to the teacher like it is no big deal. We will follow your cue but the longer you remain on deck the longer it takes for the child to get used to this new experience. We have floor to ceiling glass so you can watch your child and they can feel safe knowing that you are only a short distance away. Our teachers are experienced and trained in handling children that are anxious and/or crying. We will hold a child tighter than they hold us and let them know they are safe.
We are always here to help. If you need help or advice during the lesson just ask our deck managers. Our goal and your goal are the same, which is the best possible swim lesson for your child.
I just saw this cool app for scheduling playgroups. It is called RedRover as in come on over. It allows you to reach out to your contacts and schedule a playdate. It also can use gps to find out who is close that might want to come over and play. Cool gadget for techie parents.
You’ve probably seen it before: parents at the pool chatting with friends who turn their back for a few seconds, when suddenly, a child is gasping for help. Instinctively, mothers and fathers will often dive in or immediately pull their child from the pool, often causing such a commotion that the child is more scared than it realized and ultimately, left with a bad feeling about the water.
Coming to your first swim lesson can be a very emotional time for your child. Think back to the first day you went to school or first day on a job and remember the feelings of uncertainty and insecurity. You were going to a new place with people you did not know. So if you child is a little nervous, that is perfectly understandable. This is especially true if your child is anxious around the water or has had a bad experience in the water.
