Swimming Lessons and Gymnastics

This summer Julia had two weeks of swim lessons with one of her friends, and did a once a week gymnastics class at the local community center.

Julia loves to swim at our pool at home with her floaty vest, but we discovered that her fear of putting her head under water was a huge deterrent to learning how to swim this year. Maybe she'll be more reasonable next year? She refused to put her head under the water, which means we were always trying to get her to cooperate with jumping into the water (because her head would go under water) and floating on her back (because she felt like her head was going under).

After the first week I really worked with her at our pool at home (and in the bathtub) to help her realize floating on her back wasn't that bad. So the second week she did improve her back floats and was almost able to float on her own. She still had a hard time with jumping into the water, although she at least attempted it a couple times after a lot of coaxing and sometimes chasing her down. Besides jumping in and back floats she really enjoyed learning how to kick and blow bubbles and the playing around with her friend that small children require to keep them happy during swimming lessons.

Here she is cowering in the corner because she doesn't want to take her turn doing back floats.

After swimming lessons ended she started a once a week gymnastics class. She loved doing gymnastics. The class did some actual gymnastics, but a lot of fun moving around stuff to get them active too. I think all the running around and somersaults and jumping is right up her alley. 

I also think it taught her some good listening skills because they had to watch the coach very closely as he told them what they had to do for each station. The coach would go around and have a child demonstrate what to do at each station set up around the room, and then he would let them go at it on their own and help wherever anyone needed help. If he noticed someone wasn't paying attention when he was explaining he would call them out on it! Julia learned after the first day (with me calling out a few times to remind her here and there) to look at the coach when he's talking and pay attention!

She caught on really well to what you needed to do at each spot and usually was coordinated enough to get it done right.

Her class with their completion ribbons on the last day.

A video of one of the last circuits they did.