Welcome to the Floaties Family!

In this section, you will learn all about the basics of being a Floaties team member. 

In this section you will learn the basics of structuring a class.

Swimming is a complex motor skill.  In order to successfully teach complex motor skills, we break them down into manageable macro-steps and then more detailed micro-steps.  

Patterning is how we refer to the way we structure our classes to benefit the progression and comfort of the student. 

Teaching with intentional patterning can reduce anxiety, reinforce skills through repetition, and effectively introduce new skills.

The following are the three reasons we use patterning in teaching:

The first of the 5 sections of the teaching philosophy is Trust and Rapport.

Trust and Rapport are two separate, but important, pieces of the 5 sections yet they both have one simple purpose: to make the child feel safe at swim lessons.

There are two different but equally important types of safety: physical safety and psychological safety.

Once a solid foundation of trust and rapport has been established, we can move onto to the next step in the progression line. In this section, we will cover how to teach students to be comfortable with water on their face, holding their breath, taking a breath at the appropriate time, and holding their breath for a predetermined amount of time

 In this section, your students should begin to understand how their body moves in water, and how forces act upon their body, including vertical and horizontal buoyancy.  

Your students will physically understand how their buoyancy is affected by their center of gravity, and how their head position influences their balance and buoyancy.

A child's buoyancy and balance will affect all their swims to come so it is important that these skills are mastered and not rushed through.

The goal of this section of Floatie's progression line is to teach a child to move efficiently through the water, with correct use of breath control, buoyancy and proper body position. To achieve this, we break down our introductory stroke, polar bears, (the first propulsive movement we teach at Floaties is an underwater arm pull similar to a “doggy-paddle”) into a few smaller easier to learn sections. These sections are: polar bears arms, pop-up breaths, and kicks, then we add them all together to achieve polar bears. 

Stroke development is the final section of the Core curriculum at Floaties. Successful completion of the skills listed in this section should result in the child graduating to the Intro to Strokes level.
 

Intro to Strokes is a 30 minute, 3:1 class where the primary focus is to develop Freestyle and Backstroke with some introduction to Breaststroke and Butterfly.   
 

As a Core teacher, your responsibility is to teach your students up through this final progression line, then to have them transition into the more advanced classes. Holding onto your advanced students past this level is not recommended, as we have dedicated Intro to Strokes, and Strokes instructors who teach children of this specific level only. This also allows for your schedule to open up allowing for more Core level students.  
  

More detailed progression of all four major strokes will be covered in the Floaties Swim School Strokes Manual.  

Floaties prides itself on being an inclusive program dedicated to teaching students from all different backgrounds water safety and to instill a love for swimming.

 

Drowning is the leading cause of death in children age 1-4. Swim lessons can reduce the risk of drowning by 88%. It is our goal to teach every student to be safe in and around water even when they are away from Floaties. This section will cover some of the ways to practice drills that can help in real life situations as well as resources for instructors to educate parents when they have questions.

SOPS’s

Floaties Swim School has the following Standard Operating Procedures (SOP”s) in the event of a fecal incident, medical emergency, or client injury in the pool or around the facility. Remember, this is by no means an exhaustive list, and in all situations, quick action and attentiveness to the appropriate authority is important.

It is our job as instructors to be the face of Floaties. That means working as a team to deliver the best customer service experience possible to every client.