Otane School Focus on Water Safety Skills

Otane School in central Hawke’s Bay understand the importance of water safety and their students learning the skills to keep them safe in, on, and around the water.

The school has been receiving support through the State Kiwi Swim Safe programme for the last two years and this summer students focused on ways and ideas for everyday equipment to be used to keep them afloat in different situations.

The students all started with classroom sessions covering different aquatic environments. They assessed how they access them, risks or hazards that may arise in them, and solutions for minimising or eliminating those potential hazards.

Swim Safe advisor Fiona Hurley was impressed with the children’s knowledge around general water safety, and also the practical thinking that went into planning or working through different scenarios. Students were asked to cover not only school or public swimming pools, but also beaches, rivers, estuaries, and lakes.

Pupils were given the opportunity to put on life jackets and go over basic survival skills when wearing a lifejacket on dry-land before applying this to the water.

“I always find a dry-land session with the children beneficial as they don’t have the distraction of the water and can really focus on the skills being taught,” said Hurley.

Following the classroom based information session, Fiona went back to the school and worked with the students in the water to see how much knowledge they had retained. Students practiced their swimming technique as well as being challenged to use different equipment as floatation devices such as buckets, chilly bins, netballs, milk containers, and other plastic cubes.

The students realised that most things they could do with a flutter board they could also do with everyday items such as one arm freestyle with a two litre milk container. The concept of buoyancy and floatation was experimented with as some items were more buoyant than others, meaning swimmers used less energy to stay afloat while applying this to different survival situations.

Fiona will continue to support the school and ensure students and teachers have resources and ideas to apply to their current swim programme.