Swimming
Learning to swim at Moordown St John’s
We are fortunate enough to have our own pool at MSJ which means that we can give every child who attends our school the opportunity to learn to swim. We employ a professional swimming instructor, who plans and delivers a progressional swimming curriculum.
The National Curriculum has a minimum requirement, that by the time pupils leave Key Stage 2, they are able to:
- Swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of 25m
- Use a range of strokes effectively
- Perform self-safe-rescue in different water-based situations
Our excellent facilities and the expert delivery from our swimming instructor, enables lessons to be well organised, structured, controlled and continuously monitored. We recognise that the pupils in our school have a range of swimming abilities, but we seek to provide consistent swimming lessons which enable all pupils to make progress.
What do we teach?
To meet the three national curriculum requirements for swimming and water safety, our lessons focus on developing some or all of the following skills and strokes in different water-related contexts:
- how to enter and exit the water
- floatation
- submerging
- rotating from back to front and front to back and regaining an upright position
- pushing and gliding and an understanding of streamlining
- aquatic breathing
- moving effectively and efficiently through the water using alternating and simultaneous strokes on front and back, such as front crawl, back crawl, breast stroke, side stroke
- swimming longer distances and for increasing amounts of time
- using swimming skills and strokes for different purposes
- survival and self-rescue skills
- water safety: knowledge and understanding of different water environments, how to stay safe when playing in and around water
