Youth Swimming Lessons
Montana Swim Academy offers youth swimming lessons to children ages 3 and older. Our youth swimming program follows a two pronged approach. The first three levels focus on water survival and the last three focus on stroke development. We believe in making children safe first, before moving on to learning strokes. Each level provides children with the guidance they need to improve their swimming. Our staff carefully monitors each child to help them best learn how to swim and improve their abilities in the water.
Water Survival
Turtle
The first level of our youth swimming lessons, Turtle works on water acclimation skills. Similar to our Starfish goals, Turtle lessons work on helping students take their first steps into the water. The primary purpose of these lessons is to work on the confidence of the child and assist them in getting more comfortable in the water without assistance.
Otter
The second level of youth lessons, Otter teaches some initial independent techniques for basic water survival. These continue to develop skills that increase confidence of the student. Our staff wants safety for swimmers first and foremost, so these lessons help to establish safer swimming before moving on to more involved lessons.
Seal
Seal lessons go another step above Otter and provide some of the first swimming distance lessons to students. Since students know how to safely float, Seal then works on movement in the water. We help students develop the ability to swim on their front or back. They also learn how to transition between these two swimming forms while in the water.
Stroke Development
Dolphin
Once basic swimming skills have developed, stroke patterns become the focus with our Dolphin level. Dolphin teaches both freestyle and backstroke. These two stroke patterns provide each student with a fundamental understanding of proper swim technique. From here, students gain a beginner’s lesson on how to breaststroke to learn what the proper technique is for further development.
Shark
Shark takes the lessons of Dolphin another step forward. Students continue developing the distance they travel through freestyle and backstroke, while also developing a working breaststroke. Our team emphasizes proper technique to ensure each student performs their best when swimming. Lastly, students also start beginning lessons of butterfly to round out their high-level forms of swimming.
Orca
Orca sits at the top of our developmental program goals. Students at this level learn to master the breaststroke that they developed in previous stages. They also improve and start to perform butterfly over distance. After each stroke has reached a satisfactory level, we then add in starts and turns for each stroke. This prepares the student for practice and training at a competitive level, should they choose.