Lately I have been revisiting the use of those lovely tactile black rubberised blocks in my swimming lessons. They sit for months untouched in the equipment room and although I wasn't particularly looking for inspiration they grabbed me en route to my stage 4 classes. The children's eye's lit up as they spotted them and proceeded to ask what we were going to do with them. "We'll see" I said, not knowing. We warmed up, sitting on the pool floor with our hands on our heads and rotating for fun before experimenting with side floats, side glides and super slow front crawl arms, "chicken wings" and rolling to backs for a breath. Then as this had led us to experiment with sculling headfirst it struck me that some children did not have very effective moves in this regard and "Underwater Jenga" was born in an instant.
Always out to point children in the right direction without giving the answer I set them a challenge to make a jenga tower with their feet. They laughed, loved it and succeeded and failed then succeeded and at the end I asked them what they thought the purpose of the game was. They said "To move things with our feet" and I said "Did you move your arms at all?" They didn't know it but they had been sculling around for ages in a vertical position with great skill to effect their precision lifting and parking. The skill of course evaporated as soon as some of them tried to scull on their backs by engaging their brains to do so. However the skill is in there, it hides inside their bodies and appears when they have turned off their intellect. The skill appeared again when we turned our back sculling into armchair sculling and that time it stayed, nailed down, owned, not demonstrated, perfectly comfortable and much wider in it's range of skill application.
A few days later I used the blocks again with another stage to act as something diferent to hold as they front kicked along. How it felt surprised them because they expected the block to make them sink further in the water. It did not and even the smallest swimmer could move effortlessly with it in their hands. Then I asked them to work out how best to carry the block while on their backs. This was fascinating as it led them to experiment with block position and speed / efficiency of kick. Boys struggled more than the girls to keep their faces dry until they found how to raise their hips or adjust their kick. Some didn't go far but they enjoyed the process, the concept , the change and my response to their efforts.
So old things can become new things when you open your mind to the possibility that there is more than one way to learn something. Infact there are so many ways and children are intrinsically wired to learn in mutliple ways like this. The skills they learn from these activities appear to come and go with the location of their intellectual attention and when they focus it can appear to evaporate. This is why parents who watch anxiously from the side for the preconceived patterns of strokes that they expect their child to perform immediately can be more disappointed than most purely because they have unwittingly placed unecessary pressure onto their child. The other children carry on adding their skills together subconsciously making the connections they need to succeed soon while the watched child struggles with itself to co-ordinate something that it is not ready to do yet. This can leave them behind and sad unless the parent is reassured that there is no need to worry and to let go of their detrimental overseership.
Joyful skills are powerful skills, they cost less energy and they lead to efficency and resilience. A little more patience and the end result is far superior to any deceptively pretty, rushed, overly imposed patterns of movement. What matters is how the pattern develops and how strong it is not it's immediacy.
What do we want for our swimmers? To be water cognisant enough to be able to make a huge range of exploratory adjustments for detailed fine tuning later or to be strongly constrained from the start to a narrow field of exploration that is unecessarily dull, bravely thrashed out or emotionally flat?
I know which I prefer for my pupils because I want safe swimmers not false swimmers.
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