School Intensive Swimming Program 2023
Planning is underway for St Mary’s Intensive Swimming Program. All students are encouraged to participate in this program. Swimming is very much a part of the Australian lifestyle and a high level of swimming ability and knowledge and skill in water safety is not only highly desirable but could be life saving.
The program will run over five days, from Monday 20th of November to Friday 24th of November. The program will meet the needs of the K – 6 PDHPE Syllabus and is under the control of L&R Group from the Holland Park Swim Centre and their qualified instructors. Class teachers will attend to supervise. The primary aim is to develop each child’s swimming ability. The program will offer the following skill levels:
| WATER LEARNER | Water Learner encourages children to become independent in the water. We introduce the fundamentals of water safety and continue to develop water confidence. The core focus is to get the child to stay afloat and start achieving short distances of propulsion. |
| WATER BASIC | This level introduces swimming skills. At this level, children will learn kicking, breathing, streamline, body position and arm rotation, the core swimming skills needed to ensure your child has the correct techniques for their on-going development. |
| WATER SKILLS | Children are now displaying correct freestyle techniques. We start to advance the distances of swimming to 15 metres. Backstroke is also introduced along with more advanced skills and drills to refine the child’s stroke and to continue water confidence. |
| SQUAD |
Squad training has various levels. Re-enforcing the core swimming skills over a longer distances of 25m. The 50m squads focuses on fine tuning all four strokes along with further development of dives, introduction of turns, starts and finishes. There is also a concentration on developing fitness and fun in all squads. |
The students will be placed in groups depending on their level of ability as advised by parents. Students will be assessed on the first day to make sure they are in the correct group.
Students not attending the program will be supervised at school and set appropriate literacy learning activities.
St Mary's would like thank the hardworking Community Council for their efforts and our school community, who have supported fundraisers over the past year. This has allowed the Community Council to donate half the amount of the swimming lesson costs to our families.
Once costs have been finalised an event will be sent out on Compass to pay for the lessons and to advise swimming level.