Since ancient times swimming has played an important role in people's lives and today swimming is one of the basic physical skills of the people. The turning points for the development of swimming in Slovenia was the program called “Naučimo se plavati (Let's Learn to Swim)” and the project “Plavaj od 0 do 100 let (Swim from 0 to 100 years)”. With these two base guidelines, swimming literacy improved, compulsory swimming instructions in primary school were introduced and criteria for assessing swimming skills were implemented. Learning to swim is different from learning other forms of movement, since this skills are learned in a completely different environment - water. It is important that in addition to the gradual learning of swimming we also take into account that first, we learn the swimming movements on land, where children get an idea of the movements and then we transfer this movements into the water. The problem we were wondering about in the master’s thesis is whether we can transfer swimming movements into the classroom.
Given that the current epidemic does not allow the implementation of swimming courses at the pools, we obtained the results with a questionnaire, where teachers analyzed and gave an opinion about
recordings of swimming exercises for pupils performed on land. Imitations of swimming exercises on land included exercises for exhalation, for body position, for basic back technique (strokes, paddles), for basic crawl technique (strokes, breathing, paddles) and exercises for basic chest technique (strokes, paddles, and breathing).
The results of the research show that according to teachers compulsory swimming courses in primary school are too short for pupils to be able to automate swimming movements. The introduction of swimming elements in a “minute for health” brings positive effects, such as faster progress, better swimming skills and consequently increases the number of automated movements. The research also explored the positive and negative effects of introducing swimming elements in a “minute for health” and gives results which of the teachers would include the given videos in their class and why.
There are no statistical differences between teachers with respect to gender, age and place of teaching or among teachers with different experiences in teaching swimming. We found out that on average, most teachers would include elements of swimming into the classroom.
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