First Week of Splash

Last week was my first two days of Splash. I have to admit, I was really nervous at first, and quite overwhelmed, but we didn't have time to slowly immerse ourselves! On the kids first day, we separated them by asking "have you ever been swimming before?" or "do you like to put your face in the water" I quickly grabbed 5 or 6 of the kids that stepped forward and assessed what they could do. We had a list of questions that we were supposed to go through, like can they jump in the water and stand up, can they float? can they bob up and down in the water? Can they do the front crawl? the back crawl? can they tread water? For the two days, I taught around 60 third graders, I had 3 that I even attempted to show me if they could tread water and only 1 could for about 10 seconds. I maybe had 10 that could front crawl 5 feet or so. More than half could not float and most struggled with going down in the water, coming up, taking a breath and going back under (bobs). These are the kids I'm most excited to work with. I can't wait to see how much they progress throughout the 10 weeks of class. We were only assessing the first day so we knew which level to start them in with their actual lessons. So we got to spend the rest of the time playing games. We'd finish with one class, and the next was coming out of the locker rooms to wait on the bleachers, so we'd start all over. Thursday, we had no break, so I had 5 back to back to back classes. I was completely drained by my last class. Trying to maintain the same level of enthusiasm for 3 hours is mentally exhausting! And being in a swimming pool for 3 hours in waist deep water is freezing cold so those two things will definitely be my biggest challenges that I can see at this point.