Find out about your swimming pool’s safety rules. You could look out for useful posters or leaflets, or ask a pool attendant for information.
Ask your child to watch what the lifeguards do. Why do they blow their whistle and tell people off? What sort of things are dangerous in the pool?
Back at home, you could ask your child to make a poster or leaflet explaining the swimming pool’s safety rules.
Personal Survival
Personal survival lessons teach children how to keep safe in the water and, if they are involved in an accident, how to survive in the water until help arrives.
Help them to try a range of fun survival skills, for example:
- floating in different ways
- making floats out of clothes
- ‘duck-diving’ to swim through hoops or collect objects from the bottom of the pool.
Set your child on an obstacle course in the water. See if they can swim along with a ball without touching it with their hands, duck-dive through a hoop, and then stay floating in one position for two minutes.
If your child is interested in taking a personal survival badge, they will need to be able to swim a long way without stopping, touching the ground or the edge of the pool. Set different time challenges for your child – can they swim without stopping for 5 minutes? 10 minutes? 15 minutes?