Month: November 2020

Today’s parents are busier than ever. Between work, commute, housekeeping, and other obligations, it’s often difficult to find the time to provide your children with the fun and exercise they need to develop correctly and enjoy their day to the fullest. 

The easiest and most effective solution to this problem is to take your kid to a quality daycare camp in San Diego, such as the one at The Plunge swimming pool. This gives you the time you need to deal with your responsibilities, while also ensuring your child’s needs are met in a fun, safe, and educational manner.

But how can you tell if a particular daycare camp is right for your child? What are the telltale signs of a top-of-the-line daycare camp? Keep reading to find out!

What should I look for when choosing a daycare camp?

Your daycare camp of choice should be focused not just on offering fun activities for your kids, but also with facilitating their education, making sure they get enough exercise to really let out their energy, and providing them with healthy and well-balanced meals. 

Here’s what you should look for when picking a daycare camp for your kid:

1. Activity-based curriculum

Quality daycare camps use optimized curriculums that include not just physical activity, but also arts and science. Furthermore, they should help kids keep up with distance learning by providing them with special classrooms that allow them to attend their classes and school meetings via Zoom or a similar video call program. 

All this serves to exercise your child’s mind in a fun and engaging manner, while also providing a regular schedule that includes everything else your kid needs. 

2. High-quality workout time

There’s no better way for a child to exercise than at a first-rate swimming pool that’s constantly monitored by experienced lifeguards and mentors. Water-based activities are fun, extremely safe, and serve as a whole-body workout that helps your kid develop properly.

Other great physical activities for kids include:

• Various sports
• Kids’ yoga
• Miniature golf
• Ropes course
• Rock wall climbing

3. Safety

In addition to making sure your children are safe while they’re inside the pool, top-of-the-line daycare camps should follow extensive cleaning standards and observe all relevant government safety regulations.  

4. Flexible scheduling

People who run successful daycare camps understand that working parents frequently have to juggle numerous time-consuming responsibilities on any given day, and that this often makes it impossible for them to plan everything out in advance. 

In order to meet the needs of busy parents, reputable daycare camps offer hourly, daily, and weekly drop-in scheduling options, as well as early drop-off and late pick-up. They will go out of their way to align themselves with your busy schedule and ensure your kids get the most out of however much time they can spend at the daycare camp. 

5. Pedigree

Your kids’ comfort and safety is too important to be entrusted to a “budget” daycare camp that may or may not be trying to cut corners at every turn. For this reason, you should always pick a well-known daycare camp that has been around for awhile and boasts an impeccable track record. 

Enjoy our premium San Diego poolside daycare camp at The Plunge

Located inside of Fit Mission Beach at Belmont Park, the historic San Diego Plunge is a public pool with a tradition that’s almost a century long. In addition to a state-of-the-art daycare camp for children aged 5-12, it also offers both private and group swimming lessons, water aerobics, public pool services, party rentals, and more. 

Make your reservation today or give us a call if you’d like to ask further questions. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Giving your kid a break from the usual is just as important as providing them with a safe and organized environment. A great way to do this is by taking them to a poolside daycare camp such as the one at The Plunge, San Diego, where they can take part in various fun and educational activities. 

Read on to learn more about what these camps are and how they work. 

What are the advantages of a daycare camp?

Poolside daycare camps are designed to provide both education and fun. By enabling you to focus on your responsibilities while also ensuring your kid has a great time, they’re also immensely useful to parents with busy schedules. 

Advantages provided by daycare camps include:

Consistent schedule and activities

By following a consistent and well-rounded schedule every day (even for younger kids), a daycare camp makes sure your child gets the appropriate amount of physical activity and learning, and is fed high-quality meals.  

Enhanced education

First-rate daycare camps have designated classroom spaces for kids who have to attend their school meetings remotely via Zoom or similar video call software. Furthermore, they include a variety of crafts, science projects, and educational enrichment activities. 

Kids love them

Put yourself in your child’s shoes: is there anything you’d enjoy more than spending an entire day at a top-notch swimming pool, surrounded by kids your age, and learning interesting new things? 

Does daycare affect a child’s development?

Daycare camps are all about giving kids an opportunity to remain active while learning or participating in different activities. By helping them exercise both their minds and their bodies, daycare camps positively impact a child’s development over the long term.

Here are some of the ways a poolside daycare camp helps children develop:

• Swimming is an excellent full body workout that carries very little risk of injury. It’s particularly useful for kids who are suffering from chronic bronchitis and other respiratory conditions, as it helps them strengthen their lungs. 
• It fosters social skills. Knowing how to make friends and get along with others is a crucial life skill. By spending a lot of time around other children in a safe and controlled environment, your kids will have ample opportunity to build their social skills. 
• It boosts the immune system. Although it may seem that kids at the daycare are constantly sick, the reality is that all those early sniffles serve to toughen up your kid’s immune system in the long run. 

What age should you send your child to a daycare camp?

The best age to send kids to a quality daycare camp is between 5 and 12 years old. At 5 years old, children are at the point in their lives where they’re still too young for school, but old enough to start partaking in organized physical and educational activities. 

For school-age kids, daycare camps can serve as an excellent way to spend the day while their parents are at work or otherwise occupied. This way, the child gets to have fun, stay active, and learn new things, and the parent doesn’t have to worry that their kids aren’t making the most of their precious summer vacations. 

Visit our top daycare camp at The Plunge, San Diego

Located in Mission Beach, The Plunge is a state-of-the-art public pool in San Diego that was first built all the way back in 1925. Our daycare camp opens at 12:30pm and closes at 5:30pm, Monday through Friday, and can be scheduled with hourly, daily, or weekly drop-in options. 

Feel free to visit us today or give us a call if you’d like to learn more about what we offer. We’re eager to meet you! 

Spending the day at an open swim in San Diego, CA, with your kids is one of the most fun activities you can do as a family. And as we all know, time passes fast when you’re enjoying yourself! Before you know it, you’ve been in the water for hours and the skin on your hands and feet has gotten all wrinkly. 

Should you be concerned? Can spending an afternoon in a quality pool have negative effects on your or your loved ones’ health? Should you limit the time your kids spend in the water? Can spending more time in the pool facilitate the spread of waterborne disease? 

In previous articles, we gave you a list of swimming pool safety tips, and told you what you should and should not do at a public pool. Now we’ll answer some common questions about what happens to a person’s body when they spend a lot of time in a pool. Keep reading to learn more.

How long should you stay in a swimming pool?

There’s no such thing as a medical limit on how much time a person can safely stay in water. However, there are certain factors that may affect your overall experience in the pool. 

Consider the following: 

Heat loss

We lose body heat at a rate that’s 4 times faster in water than in air. The colder the water is, the faster you’ll lose heat. If the water is extremely cold, it may actually cause most of your blood to go back into the torso. This may deprive your limbs of oxygen and make using them more difficult. 

Luckily, state-of-the-art public pools use heating systems that maintain optimal water temperatures (around 82 degrees fahrenheit) at all times. 

Fatigue

Just because you or your children are in the water doesn’t mean you can’t get thirsty or tired. Although the risk of heat exhaustion is much lower in swimming than it is in other youth sports, you should still make sure your kids stay hydrated while in the pool. 

Sunburns

Being in the water will partially protect your skin from the Sun’s harmful rays. However, the key word here is “partially”. If you’re going to be spending a lot of time in a pool, you’ll need to make sure both you and your children are wearing sunscreen. 

What happens if you stay in a pool for too long?

Contrary to popular belief, there’s no reason to worry about the wrinkly skin that appears on your feet and hands after you spend a lot of time in the water. This is actually your body’s way of increasing skin traction. In other words, by becoming wrinkly, your skin makes it easier for you to swim, grip slick things, and walk in shallow water. 

If the chemical balance in the water is at optimal levels, you can spend as much time in it as you want. Eventually, you’ll start getting tired and cold, which will prompt you to leave the pool. 

Where can I find a first-rate open swim in San Diego, CA?

Located near the Bonita Cove, The Plunge is a historic public pool in San Diego that was first built in 1925. In addition to containing both open swim and lap pool areas, the facility features a variety of other services, including a gym, sauna, water aerobics programs, one-on-one swimming lessons, and more.

Our operational schedule is Monday-Thursday from 6:30am to 6:30pm, and Friday-Sunday from 8:30am to 6:30pm. Give us a call today if you have further questions or if you’d learn more about the pool rental options we offer. 

Whether you’re a serious athlete who regularly exercises at a public lap pool, or a parent who occasionally takes their kids to an open swim in San Diego, you need to know how to behave in a way that reduces the chance of unpleasantness or injury. 

In order to help you out, we have provided a list of easy-to-follow swimming pool rules that will ensure you and your loved ones are always welcome at both public and private pools. Keep reading to learn more. 

What’s the right way to behave at a swimming pool? 

Like any other public place, public pools have some written and unwritten guidelines that visitors are expected to follow. The good news is, most of these come down to exercising common sense and basic hygiene. 

Here are the top 7 universal rules for swimming pool etiquette:

1. Look and think before entering

Leaping or diving head-on into a swimming pool is a recipe for disaster even when no other swimmers are present. In order to stay safe while swimming, you should always take a moment to make sure there’s nothing in the way before getting into a public pool.

2. Stick to your lane

Public pools often have lap lanes that are clearly marked as fast, medium, or slow. Pick a lane that’s right for you and stay in it to avoid interfering with other swimmers. 

3. Bandages, rashes, and wounds

Imagine swimming alongside someone who’s covered in rashes, bandages, or scrapes. Now imagine this individual swimming next to your children. Sounds alarming, doesn’t it? That’s how other people feel when you or your kids show up at the pool sporting rashes and band-aids, so please don’t do this. 

4. Refrain from splashing

Splashing can be quite fun, but only if you’re the one doing it. Other people will just get annoyed, and it may even cause kids to get in a fight. For this reason, you should teach your children not to splash in public (or other people’s) pools. 

5. The restroom is there for a reason

We really wish we didn’t have to keep repeating this, but peeing is something you should never do in a swimming pool. In addition to being disgusting, bodily fluids in the water can react with pool chemicals such as chlorine and create unhealthy substances in the water. 

You’ll need to be extra vigilant if your toddlers are wearing swim diapers. Make sure to change the diaper often and teach your kid to communicate with you when they need to “go”. The last thing you want is to notice your child’s accident after they’ve already been in the water for awhile. 

6. Dress appropriately

Make sure your swimwear fits well and covers all your private parts. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get a tan or show off your “beach body”, but a public pool simply isn’t the right place to wear barely-there bikinis or dirty jeans shorts. 

7. Trim your toenails

Not only are long toenails gross and more prone to getting dirty, accidentally kicking someone while swimming can easily lead to your toenails cutting their skin. In addition to being painful, this can actually cause the water to become contaminated with bacteria and other pathogens.

Where can I find the top open swim in San Diego?

Located at the heart of Mission Beach, The Plunge is a state-of-the-art public pool that boasts fully heated water, seven 25-yard lap lanes, a sauna, spin bikes, and more. In addition to open swim, we also offer private swimming lessons, water aerobics programs, pool rental services, and a number of other options. 

Visit us today and enjoy a pleasant afternoon at the finest public pool in San Diego!