Today I had alot of fun at the pool asking the children to find out what happens when you push a thin foam sheet to the pool floor to stick it down like a plaster. I routinely use these thin colourful sheets to build a thicker float, to stick on the free board wall, to curl into telescopes, to be hats for making waterfalls before your eyes or over your ears, to act as a sensory face cloth on the water surface or a pillow.....the children find more every time and never cease to make me smile at their inventiveness. So today it was to test their understanding of what will happen when they try to stick one to the pool floor as they can on the wall above the water. Of course they can't get the sheets to stick because even though they are very thin they float to the surface. They are only little in toddler splash and their parents love to see them learning something new and often ask them questions as they experiment.
Learning about water from the bottom upwards is so natural and so useful to the body. It is almost certainly how we first learned about water in our ancestral past when we were hungry and wanted to retrieve something to eat from the bottom. Just like the female Japanese macaque who first picked food off the bottom of a thermal pool and now her descendants spend the snowy winters in the "hot tub" and the expressions on their pink faces would not look out of place in the local spa! Sinkers in swimming lessons are attractive to some and others probably feel a pang of apprehension if it goes too deep for them to retrieve without putting their face in the water. It's all about having room to engage with the water by no longer being concerned with survival. For the macaques that is because they are being fed by the volcanic park workers and for humans it is about knowing enough about water to feel happy submerged inside it.
Older children can benefit enormously from experiencing the bottom of the pool at a crucial point in their learning path too. A little 6 year old I was teaching was very slight in stature and not very buoyant so I began to check what her knowledge of the uplift on her body was like by placing sinkers at the bottom of a slope into deeper water. She found it very hard to get down to the sinker so after we had played at exchanging our footprints with handprints I held her hand and we swam downslope together to get the sinker. This was a door opening into a new realm for her as she never looked back. It was the view she needed to understand that she can own the water column as well as that golden zone of breathing at the top. Infact she treasured the water column more than the golden zone that had put so much pressure on her to hone the efficiency of her movements. We spent lots of time repeating the dive stick routine as she wanted to learn more. Repetition, so crucial to the ownership of joyful skills. "Look at me" "Look what I can do" The results of her trips to the floor were extremely impressive in terms of cutting down the struggle time at the surface in pursuit of stroke perfection. Her tension was broken so she moved further, she had time to explore the thrill of the uplift and discover that bending her knees towards her tummy lifted her more. This is where the first inklings of breasttroke came from and I have watched this happen many times now with the thinner folk I teach.
So learning to swim from the bottom up may sound counterintuitive but that is only the case if you are trying to work out how to stay in the golden zone at the top. It's hard work sometimes up there, the world is noisy, splashy, you flick in and out of the singularity of air and water, trying to identify when to breathe and when to hold your breath. It need not be hard, learning need not be a fight, it can be fluid and effortless.
No comments:
Post a Comment