An award for the little girl
We enrolled S into a swim class as she asked for it.
However, on her first lesson, she didn't want to join the class.
I imagine it must be quite intimidating for a 5-year-old to go into the pool without her mummy and daddy... and to the constant barking of the instructor.
So R and I decided to work on her basics, just to get her to be more confident.
A google showed up this website
USwim, which teaches parents how to teach their kids to swim
We followed some of the steps, and got her confident enough to dunk her head into the water and do her confidence jump.
I also came up with the idea of an award in the form of a certificate.
It also helps that "gong gong" speaks very loudly, so I simply explained to her that the instructor really didn't mean to yell all the time.
It's just that some uncles speak very loudly, like her "gong gong" :P
This worked too, and she gamely joined the class during the second week.
She's now into jumping into the water all by herself and kicking/paddling about 1.5m towards R. She doesn't know how to coordinate her breathing yet, so she does this with her head in the water the whole time.