This is a no-brainer for anybody learning how to swim! Breathing while swimming is always a tough thing to teach. There may be some instructors who've figured out how to teach it better than myself but the challenge comes with going back underwater.
The numbers game is a great starting place to teach the breathing. It's 100 percent an advanced skill so you should only teach it when they've mastered short distance swims. I've always used toys with a giant number for them to look at while you hold it in the sky. The goal here is to simply get them to pop their head up high enough to glance at the number. In essence, you're having them experiment with the effort needed to come up.
That's why it's difficult to teach because you can't necessarily teach effort and muscle use with any key wording. You can't say things like "tighten your core" or "flex your triceps". Open-ended tasks with no specific instructions will always be your friend. If you can turn specific ideas into fun open-ended tasks, you'll get your student to do the thing necessary without knowing it.
SIGNAL swimming is another huge technique to building strength. If I need swimmers to do certain things while they swim, I give them a set of signals to whatch out for underwater. I make the signals with my hand. You can figure out what signals you want to use for kicking, scooping, looking down, and looking up. These 4 key signals give you everything you need.
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