One of five parts of the Special Olympics' Sports Skills Instructional Program, the booklet addresses ways to teach swimming and diving to mentally retarded students. Short term objectives of the program encompass warmup, basic swimming and diving skills, safety, and good sportsmanship. The long term goal focuses on acquisition of basic skills, appropriate social behavior, and functional knowledge of safety to enable participation. Following information on clothing, pool preparation and equipment, skills assessment and teaching suggestions are presented for two levels of swimming skills (kicking, front and back crawl, side stroke, breast stroke, front dive, diving approach, advanced front dive, and backward dive. Suggestions are also given on infusing the sport skill to other curriculum areas. (CL)