MERBABIES SWIM SCHOOL
T E A C H W I T H L O V E , L E A R N T H R O U G H P L AY Written by Anna Payne
I
was keen to take my daughter swimming from an early age, but I found the baby swim classes to be fairly expensive, at inconvenient times, and not really aligned with my gentle parenting style. When trying to arrange lessons it seemed really hard to contact people or get information on prices and times. This wasn’t the way I wanted to engage with a brand, so I took my daughter swimming myself, and was thrilled at how quickly she was learning and progressing in the water and how much we enjoyed our fun, relaxed sessions together. After my second baby was born, I looked into classes again, but having moved out to West Lothian, I was once
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OUR ETHOS IS TEACH WITH LOVE, LEARN THROUGH PLAY AND THIS IS CENTRAL TO EVERYTHING THAT WE DO again struck by the lack of good quality, affordable, fun lessons which promoted themselves as gentle and baby-led. We eventually found a local lesson with an independent teacher, but when my youngest was six months old - just as I was contemplating my return to
work - the teacher said she was moving on. I saw an amazing opportunity and took over from her. I undertook intense training, became a qualified baby to preschool swim teacher and started Merbabies Swim School. Merbabies classes teach life saving skills, water confidence and builds the foundations for early swimming, through a gentle yet dynamic learn to swim programme. Our ethos is teach with love, learn through play and this is central to everything that we do, and HOW we do it. We don’t teach children to read by throwing a book a them, so why would we teach children to swim by throwing water at them? Instead we teach these skills through gentle, child led
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