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Membership Includes:
- Swim Lessons PRO: Online lesson and staff management to create your own levels and skills tracking swimmer progress, or use Swimming Ideas’ levels. Parents get their own login to see only their own swimmer’s information.
- Teaching Swimming Online Course.
- Level Structure Online Course
- Teaching Swimming Book PDF.
- Visual Skill Sheets: quick reference guides for vital swimming skills of all levels (12 pages) PDFs
- SwimSheets: custom hand-drawn progressions for level agnostic skills (Underwater and Glides, Crawls and Breathing, Breaststroke, Butterfly, Refining Freestyle) PDFs
- General Lesson Plans: Levels 1-4, PDFs
- Weekly Lesson Plans: Parent Tot (6 weeks). PDFs
- Weekly Lesson Plans: Level 1 (4 weeks). PDFs
- Weekly Lesson Plans: Level 2 (Two 4 week progressions). PDFs
- Weekly Lesson Plans: Level 3 (4 weeks). PDFs
- Weekly Lesson Plans: Level 4 (4 weeks). PDFs
- Swim America Stations Lesson Plans (10 stations, 14 sheets). PDFs
- How to Create Fun and Effective Swim Games eBook PDF
- How to Create Fun and Effective Developmental Swim Practices eBook PDF
*Team members get access to everything and can download or view with their own account.
Teaching Swimming Book PDF
While the online course has all of the same information, and more, you can use the print book PDF to view exclusive discussion questions and quizzes to better build your swimming knowledge.
Membership includes the online course as well as the full PDF to the print training workbook.
View the book on your favorite tablet or phone, or printed out the old fashioned way.
Need the book bound with professional printing? Buy it now from amazon.
Visual Skill Sheets
These sheets cover a diverse array of crucial swimming skills with a consistent format to quickly teach the essentials.
From left to right columns are Picture, Script or Phrase, and detailed instructions.
Give these Visual skill sheets to your instructors, your coaches, or your swimmers.
From Streamline to breaststroke drills these sheets are perfect for training staff and building a better swim program.
General Lesson Plans
Veteran swim instructors don’t need a weekly lesson plan. Not always.
As your staff increases their mastery and builds a base of swimming knowledge give them these simplified level specific guides to prompt their imagination.
Follow the tested and effective formula for swim lessons and swim team practices: activity, activity, challenge.
Teachers can draw from a bank of level specific activities and challenges.
Allow for creativity and a more natural flowing class time when your staff has a guide without being too restrictive.
Give your staff an easy to read guide to teach swimming with minimal training.
Your instructors will find them easy to read and follow their color-coded and numbered plans. Each activity and game is explained in detail. We provide songs with lyrics, skills with pictures, descriptions, and instructions on how to teach each essential swimming skill. The lesson plans have detailed songs, games, lyrics, guides built right into their color-coded awesomeness.
Premium Swim Lesson Plans Include:
- Swim America Lesson Plans: 10 Stations, 14 sheets
- General Swim Lesson plans for Levels 1-4.
- 6 Days of Parent Tot classes
- 4 Days of Level One
- 8 Days of Level Two
- 4 Days of Level Three
- 4 Days of Level Four
- 11 Visual Swimming Skill Sheets: Streamline, position 11, Supported and unsupported front glides, supported and unsupported back glides, Breaststroke arms, breaststroke kick, breaststroke drills, and breaststroke progression.
Better swim lessons
Have you ever thought to yourself:
“I just wanted to make my swim lesson program better?”
There is an easy way to improve your swim lessons in almost every facet: provide your staff with easy to use effective swim lesson plans.
That might be daunting, but there is help.
New updates to the weekly lesson plans are here as of October 2021.
We feel like its important to keep updating our lesson plans and guidance. As we refine our systems and battle test our lesson plans you get the benefit of better instruction.
If you’ve used the general lesson plans you’re familiar with the formula: Activity, Activity, Challenge. That format is now coming to the weekly level-specific swimming lesson plans.
Printer-friendly weekly lesson plans for level specific instruction.
Give these lesson plans to your swimming instructors to prepare for their class and use in the water.
Lean into a tested formula that maximizes learning and fun: Activity, Activity, Challenge.
Look at the “goals” section at the top of the page. Each day we give lesson specific goals to the swim instructor designed to ensure a high quality lesson.
SwimSheets
Visual skill sheets with lesson plans and general guidance for beginning and veteran swim instructors.
We learn through visual information best when it comes to swimming. We can demonstrate or ask someone else to perform the skill we’re asking our participants to do.
Here are hand drawn, custom made visual Instructor sheets that cover the essential swim skills for both swim lessons and beginner swim team programs.
With these new plans, you’ll have your new staff teaching like pros in no time and your veteran staff refining their technique to match the updated pictures and guidance.
Make your swim lessons more effective. Give your staff a powerful tool that they can use in the water or on deck in training.
Sheets cover:
- Underwater and Glides
- Crawls and Breathing
- Breaststroke
- Butterfly
- Refining Freestyle
- Flip turns
- Open turns
Why SwimSheets?
Everything packed into one sheet. Swimming involves a litany of nuanced skills and precise movements. The SwimSheets make teaching swimming easier. Get everything you need from doing glides and going underwater to flip turns and breaststroke.
Each sheet has two crucial elements: Picture based example side, and Skill Progression example side using Activity, Activity, Challenge formula.
Page 1:
Follow the basics on the picture based example side. For breaststroke you can see how the arms and the kick are broken into their component pieces with guides to teaching them. Turn the complicated breaststroke arm movement into simple 11, Eat, 11.
SwimSheets can teach you swim staff and the students! Show them the pictures and have them mimic it.
Page 2:
On the reverse side of each SwimSheet see an example progression of skills following the proven formula for fun and effective instruction, Activity, Activity, Challenge.
In the above example you can see the progression of front crawl with glides, glides with arm strokes, and then arm strokes with a single breath. Included are directions, pictures, and illustration to make referencing the skills easier. Finally at the end look at the challenges that tie in a future skill or promote an essential swim skill.
Quicker staff learning. More effective instruction.
Give your staff a laminated copy of the SwimSheets when they’re learning how to teach swimming. Give them a copy of the pdf!
Each SwimSheet covers a broad topic like Glides and Underwater, Crawls and Breathing, or Breaststroke.
Want your new instructor to focus on teaching front glides? Give them the Underwater and Glides sheet.
Want your swimmer to better understand how to put together breaststroke? Review the pictures and elements on the Breaststroke SwimSheet.
When I’m training new instructors or assistant coaches I want them to have an easy reference for fast delivery and minimal intervention.
I give them the SwimSheets.
Included Tool: Teaching Swimming Online Course
Teaching Swimming: Fun and Effective Instruction Online
Course for Teams!
Learn everything you need to teach fun and effective swim lessons or coach developmental swimming.
Aquatic Professionals are busy. We have a lot of things to juggle and limited time. We can only be on deck or at the pool a certain amount before we have to go home and sleep or tend to our families. You might be laughing and thinking, “Like Aquatic Professionals have a regular work schedule!”
Save time. Ensure your staff has a baseline understanding of basic concepts so you can get right in the nuances of your site specific program.
Swimming Ideas’ Teaching Swimming: Fun and Effective Instruction gives your staff everything it needs to teach swimming well.
It includes a reference for the essential swim skills from going underwater to flip turns, significant discussion and sections on how to craft command language, options to set up your class, and the benefits of waves or one at a time instruction.
This online course is intended to make your life easier. We want you to have a better swim instruction program from lessons to swim teams and training is the first step.
Give your staff access to this robust online training course that provides through pictures, text, and video detailed explanations about the 15 essential swim skills and how to actually teach a class well.
We want your staff to know what they’re doing, but also how to effectively run a class or practice. From why you should do supported front glides following a progression to what incremental progressions are, we have it all.
Built into the website is a focused online course module that limits distractions and serves as an easy way to navigate the course content.
Pictures, illustrations, scripts, and guides, your staff will have an excellent resource designed to get them teaching quickly.
Training new staff is hard. Make it easier when they can see crucial steps of the learning process with clear guidance.
Teaching Swimming’s goal is to have your instructors teaching fun and effective lessons. That means focusing on the 20% of things that generate the 80% of results in your lessons.
Your staff will learn how to start close with front glides and supported glides to edge the swimmers into doing it themselves while building trust.
Knowing the wrong answer is sometimes as good as the right one.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people teach something wrong. Yes, there are wrong ways to teach back floats. Pictured below is one of 3 listed in the training course.
When we know what is wrong we can avoid it. Knowing why its wrong makes you a better instructor because it helps you understand the reason behind the methods.
Adults and teenagers are similar when it comes to learning. We want to know why we do things not just be told to do them a certain way. Teaching Swimming online course goes in-depth into why certain ways are effective and others aren’t.
When pictures and drawings don’t work, include video.
Seeing things is better than reading them. There are videos peppered throughout the training course that best illustrate complex swimming skills. From alternate teaching tactics, to excellent examples your staff will have the hard work of discerning what’s good and what’s not.
Test not just information recall, but understanding.
Regular quizzes help retain what students learn, and provide a guiding framework for the most essential concepts. Quiz questions and tests are designed to highlight the absolute crucial concepts to teaching swimming fun and well.
Serious learning, but still having fun.
Keeping learning interesting and funny is as important as conveying it well. Enjoy the humor peppered throughout the training course while still keeping a professional tone.
Don’t delay. Get started with the online training course for your current and future staff! Start now!
Course Content
Create your own swim games.
Follow this formula for creating your own swimming games and challenges. The process is the same. Use this book to get ideas and learn the step-by-step process I take to make new games and challenges for our swim program.
Coach beginner swimmers with fun and effective instruction.
This is the distilled guide to how I create my developmental swim practices. After coaching full time for 11 years, I’ve refined the process into this repeatable format.
Learn how to use short distances and challenges to make the most out of your swimming program.
Get beginner swimmers competing quickly while retaining the love of swimming!
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