Today I was discussing safety rules with one of my classes of little kids. "Should we swim in the deep water?" I asked.
"No..." said the kids.
"That's right. Not until we're bigger and are super swimmers—"
"Like when we're 13!"
"And 14!"
"And 15!"
"And 12!"
"And 4!"
"4?"
"Yeah. I'm almost 4."
This from the class with the girl who, after I told them that the fish can hear us talk to them better if we put our whole faces in the water, exclaimed that, when she put her ear to the water to hear them say hello in return, the fish were "scWEAMing!"
(Then she gets annoyed when it's time to get out because we haven't done enough yet. "We only did thwee things today," she complained.)
But that's just the first class. My second class, which I was worried about because both kids were so tentative, had a banner day. They both got their faces mostly wet, "Superman'd" mostly on their own, AND jumped into the pool pretty much by themselves. This is why I love teaching the little kids: they just have such an incredible potential to amaze and astound with all the new things they discover they can do.