Reply to Goldfish swim school worth the $$$ ?

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "Goldfish swim school worth the $$$ ? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NP but what age does goldfish go up to? Would my 8 year old be too old?[/quote],

We’ve done both gold fish and kids first. I recommend kids first for an older kid. Gold fish tends to have more younger kids 5 and under and seems to cater more to beginners. One of the things I didn’t like about  gold fish is they partition the pool into very small areas and it’s not very wide (this is the rockville location so not sure if other locations are the same). We joined when DS6 could already thread water and swim but still needed to work on arm, leg coordination and technique. The swimming area for his group was so small that by the time he took 4/5 strokes he had reached the other side but did not give him enough space/time to practice and correct his stroke. The kids first pool was much bigger and better depending on the swim level. [/quote]

NP but we hated Kids First (this was the Falls Church location which has since closed). The classes were not divided at all - Goldfish has vertical lines for their classes, but Kids First didn't divide the class areas at all, so there were just several groups of kids in pool at the same time and your kid had to keep track of where there teacher was (looking from the sidelines, half the time, I couldn't figure out where my kids were). On top of that, we witnessed a child almost drown at a birthday party there because the life guard was talking to her friend at the other end of the pool. We switched to Goldfish the next week and never regretted it. My kids made so much progress much more quickly!![/quote]

I have heard nothing but good things about Goldfish from friends who have done it. We are very happy at SwimLabs and are planning to stay there so can’t speak from personal experience. British Swim School was useless even for my kid with no aversion to water. If you can afford it, I’d go with a program with a small number of kids per class and ability to move up quickly (my understanding is Goldfish has those as does our SwimLab. I think making fast progress can be really motivating. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics