Regatas Volunteer was organized by my swimming coach for the past months with the aim of helping the children in the swimming team improve their technique while having fun. This was a SERVICE activity that I really enjoyed and will continue doing as it involves a passion of mine: swimming. I got 20 hours of SERVICE as a result.

The learning outcomes of this activity is are:

LO3:Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience

LO4: Show commitement to and perseverance in CAS experiences

LO7: Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions

LO6: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global signficance.

Regatas Volunteer

Idea:

In july, this activity was just an idea that some of my friends and I had. Several times, while we waited for our competitions to start, we would watch the smaller children swim and think to ourselfs how their technique was wrong and what could be done to make them improve. (LO3)

As a consequence, we went to our coach and told her what we had experienced and that we thought it would be a good idea if maybe some days we could get together and correct their faults. During school vacations, we spent some days planning how the activity could be done and what we would do that would make them improve. Finally, in August we started our activity. (LO4)

My teamates in this activity are: Hernando Tejada, Christian Mayer, Kaori Miyahara and Domenico Peñaloza.

Week one:

Along with other swimmers from the Peruvian Selection, we had a meeting with the kids and told them our idea, which they loved. Spending time with smaller children that persue your same passion is something none of us regret.

From that time on, we have spent one hour twice a week helping them with various things. During the first week we were going to focus on seeing them swim and have ideas on how to improve.

Each of us had to look at five different children while they were swimming. As our opinions could be biased, we asked each other if our ideas were correct. If they were, we would write down the name and their fault in a journal so that we could later on refer to that.

In my group, I have three girls and two boys; Mariel, Hannah, Daniela, Felipe and Ignacio. Mariel currently swims freesytle and trains very hard but she does not seem to improve her times so I worked extra hard with her. For example, when she recoverred her arm to begin the stroke, she would have her arm straight but she should have been bent in a 90 degree angle.

I separated her from the rest of the group and I told her to swim various lenghts thinking about her arm. We did different excercises such as dragging her arm across the water. At the end of the lesson, Mariel had improved a lot but she has to remember to put her arm in the correct position when she trains so that it becomes permanent.

Week two:

During this week we guided them through the movements so that they could understand what we were expecting from them. This improved how the children recalled the movement and it was easier to explain it to them.

It was very cold for us because we had to stand in the pool in the middle of Peru's cold winter, but it was worth it. The children in our group understanded us even more what we were asking and expecting from them so they improved a lot.

One of the great things that has been a result of this activity is that I have become friends with them and Mariel, one of the girls in the team, has even become a great friend of mine. On Tuesday, Mariel came to me saying that she had been having a hard time in school, balancing homeworks and swimming.

I gave her some tips that I did when I was her age. Some examples of what I did are doing my homework as soon as I got to Regatas or doing all the homeworks on the weekend so that you are free during the week.

Week three:

Last week (LO4) we decided to teach the kids the starts as they can lower they times a lot by just improving this. The starts are specially important if they swim short distances as it can be crucial to win.

First we started with the starts and the best was Felipe. He had a good reaction and position in freestyle so what we tried to refine with him was the other starts such as backstroke.

Mariel had some good aspects such as the position but when she entered the water, her arms were separated and her body did not enter through the same place as her arms. Therefore, we did a game were Mariel had to pass through a hula-hula and if she touched it, she had to dance. This made her make an extra effort and at the same time it was fun!

This motivated her a lot as Mariel found the fun side to correcting her technique and as a consequence, she wanted start fast. I found out this day that it is important that you come with a great attitude to this kind of activities because the children get influenced heavily.

Seeing the person that is going to train with you for the next hour is happy to be there and to see you, impacts the children. This is because they perceive you attitude and they feel encouraged to get better. (LO7)

I feel satisfied with this service activity because in our current society, the obesity percentage in children has increased significantly. Therefore, we were encouraging kids to do an hour of sport twice a week, which would later on improve their lifestyle (LO6).

This was the last week of our activity as we had already completed all our goals with them like improving their their starts, finishes, stroke and kick. In total we had spent about 20 hours doing "Regatas Volunteer". I think we are going to miss coaching them a lot as they were fun to teach.

I had a meeting before publishing this article with my supervisor because I was not sure of where I had to place the Learning outcomes but at the end, I decided to place them beside the sentences that showed I had accomplished those LO.

LO3: With the help of my friends we created an activity to help children improve their swimming techniques.

LO4: The activity lasted one month but we had been planning it for much longer.

LO7: Our attitude when teaching the children had to be positive because it would encourage them to be happy when coming to swim.

LO6: I felt happy that we could aid making children do sport because nowadays many suffer from obesity.

CAS Blog

Luciana Pun

Regatas Volunteer