Swimming Pool Mats And How To Use Them in Swimming Lessons

Swimming pool mats in your swimming lesson can be a lot of fun and there are so many ways to use them; as can be seen from this article

Wait... Get Your Lesson Plans Here

Ideas For Using Swimming Pool Mats

But I've used a number of ideas that are not in the article that you may find fun to try if you haven't already:

• Dive Practice:
When a student has mastered diving close to the edge of the pool, you want to extend them. You want them to learn to dive away from the edge. Using a short mat or the short edge of the mat; if you are using a large rectangle mat, the students simply dive over the mat.

It's great because unlike a noodle, as long as you are holding on to it, it stays reasonably stationary and like a noodle, if the students hit the mat it's a soft landing and they just slide off.


• Dive Slide:
This one I discovered from the above. I found some students enjoyed the experience of sliding off the mat so much that they would deliberately dive short in order to slide off the end.





Mats Help Diving Practice


Rather than getting stress about it, I would promise them that they could do it on purpose, after practice in games time. To make it even more fun, I turned the mat longways in the water so the student had, to do some sliding in order to get off. It was kind of like a flat water slide.

Obviously, the higher you are off the water when you drive onto the mat is the higher the risk, so you want low edges or no edges to make this fun. You also have to keep the mat wet and someone has to be in the water to make sure the mat stays put when the student dives onto it.

I'm sure there are lots of other ideas for using swimming pool mats out there. I hope you enjoy these ideas so much that you want to share yours in the comments below.

Enjoy     
Richard