Swim in safe waters

In the Kvapka swimming club we teach babies how to swim from the completed fourth month of their lives.We swim in two pools which are specially designed for this activity. The quality of the children´s area is very important for us so the decision of having our own pools was obvious from the beginning.

At the first lessons, we focus on building the trust between a mother and a baby. Naturally, we don´t skip the meaning of healthy motion and exercises in water.We can see it in building up the whole child´s body and the child´s imunity.What is more,moving in water helps the baby to gain the stimulations which help his brain to make more connections. His non-swimming peer doesn´t meet these stimulations.

The children that attend such swimming lessons gain a lot of advantages.They are physically more active,they develop their muscles naturally,they are cleverer and more perceptible.
They suffer from stomachache less because the movements in water help their digestion and they sleep better too. Regular hardening increases human body´s ability to defend itself. Children lead the way on the whole,even the children with the development anomalies, for example with the light brain dysfunction.

However, when talking about baby swimming, we understand, more or less, the playtime between a parent and a baby. While playing,a baby is creating a positive attitude to water.Later on,it acquires the swimming manners. From our experience,while learning swimming, the biggest problem of the older swimmers is fear. They are scared to dip the face in the water,expire under the water,even to lie down on the water surface.That is why we concentrate on managing all of these basic skills in our baby swimming lessons.

In the individual, subsequent lessons babies are learning how to hold the breath, how to breathe out in the water, float on the belly and back, fall in the water, jump to the water, dive and orientate under the water. All of the lessons are taught in a playful way using nursery rhymes, children songs and games which the babies enjoy very much.( Read more:Aims and nursery rhymes) Babies join the lyrics and the melody with the specific movement in water. We can limit long explanations because even small babies know soon which excercise is coming by hearing the rhyme.

We follow the managed elements easier and the children learn new exercises faster. Step by step we develop and improve the acquired skills from the previous lessons.The 5 year old swimmers who finish the swimming courses in our club know the principles of three swimming styles. They know the techniques of swimming and breathing on their specific level. At the age of 5, we have good swimmers in our club. It is our pleasure to say that the results of our children are comparable and in some parameters even better that the results of their peers in other parts of Slovakia and in the foreign countries.

However, the main point of baby swimming is in its emotional transport towards family. Babies enjoy the water exercise, the contact with its parent and later on with its peers. Parents learn to work with their children, they get to know each other in unusual situations and they learn to trust each other. The emotional bond is streghtening. Although children are ready to join the peers around the age of 3, they can perceive, copy and adjust the peers from the safe parent´s arms.

From our experience, we know that going through these activities helps the children to adapt to the daycare with less troubles. Our team is continually learning new things and getting inspired by new ideas to get better so we can offer a new dimension to the baby swimming. We are moving on because the work is different with each child and it requires an individual attitude. We fully respect the individuality of each child, we accept it and we are willing to adjust to its needs.