Taranaki students ready to have fun and stay safe in the water this summer

Students from Coastal Taranaki School are learning the skills they need to keep them safer in and around the water this coming summer.

Twelve classes from the school, all years one to eight, were recently visited by Swimming New Zealand Education Advisor Cecilie Elliot who took them through classroom based Dry Land Survival Skills sessions.

The sessions worked towards developing the students’ survival skills and learning how to make safe decisions around water.

Cecilie, along with the school’s teachers, were able to cover topics including safety at the beach, life jackets and a variety of dry land exercises focusing on all the muscles used in swimming, including survival skills. They also role played some mock rescues and discussed a number of different water safety scenarios.

Next term Cecilie will be back at the school for a pool session, where the students will get to put into practice what they learnt in the classroom.

The day after the sessions, students from one of the classrooms did posters detailing what they learnt. Cecilie was asked to judge the posters, and was impressed with the information the students retained and put into artwork.

Every poster was so different, very colourful and all included information about keeping themselves safe around water, whether it was at a beach, at a river or on a boat. Two students were judged the winners, Raven Baird (yr 6) and Kason Koboski (yr 5).