How To Prepare My Child For Their Swimsafer Tests
Picture of our Odysseus Aquatics students clearing their Level 3 test
As the new school year is approaching, many parents will be gearing themselves up to prepare for various tests and exams.
We get a lot of queries about how, as parents, can we help our children to be ready for their swimming tests. We have came up with a few simple ways to prepare them:
Let them have more time for practice - Don’t skip classes unnecessarily!
Quoting from the Outlier book by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell explains that reaching the 10,000-Hour Rule, which he considers the key to success in any field, is simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with 20 hours of work a week for 10 years.
Granted that it is not a simple task to clock 10,000 hours of practice, we must not deny that any extra practice is good! If you are staying in a condominium that has private pool facilities, then take the chance to let them head to the pool more often.
Otherwise, a more intentional travel to the swimming pool to practice is unavoidable if you would want your child to progress much faster.
In the simplest basis of things, don’t let them skip lessons if you an help it! With only 45 minutes to an hour of training every single week, if students come late or are absent, there will be lesser time for coaches to work with them on their strokes.
This is also partially why we observe your attendance very closely at Odysseus Aquatics as well.
2. Ensure that your child is practicing the correct skill
There are many videos circulating in Youtube, teaching people how to swim a particular stroke. Unfortunately, all of these videos are NOT regulated for accuracy of strokes. We have skimmed through a lot of videos and some of them were teaching atrociously wrong techniques.
Other than that, some videos are more focused on competitive strokes so the strokes may look slightly different as compared to what we teach on the learn-to-swim level.
With that in mind, for students who are learning at Odysseus Aquatics, our coaches go through a strict level of our lesson plans. If you would like to check on the accuracy of techniques, please feel free to speak with our head coach, Coach Nian and he will be able to advise you further on the correct techniques to practice for your child.
Remember, success is not achieved overnight. It is achieved through consistency and perserverence. Although these two pointers may seem very straight forward and a no-brainer, it is ensuring the consistency that is difficult between parents and their children.
We hope this short post is useful for you!