The largest class, the oldest children, and the two years that have a destination: at the end of grade six every child here leaves for the school on the next island.
What is taught: Dhivehi, English, mathematics, science, Islam, social studies, and the practical and physical periods. Science here is taught without a laboratory, which means demonstrations on a table, the garden, the beach and the boat, and a good deal of measuring. It is not a substitute for a laboratory and we say so to the children as well as to their parents.
The two things particular to these grades. First, the twenty minutes a day with grades one and two, where each older child hears a younger one read. It helps the little ones and it does more for the older ones: a child who has to explain a sound to a six year old understands it differently, and the three children in this class who find reading hardest are all better readers for having taught somebody younger.
Second, the preparation for the move. From the second term of grade six there is a period a week on it: what a school of six hundred is like, how a timetable with eight subject teachers works, how to ask a teacher something in a class of thirty, and what the boat and the hostel arrangements involve. We also take the whole class over on the boat twice to sit in lessons there.
That move is the biggest thing that happens to a child from this island, and a child who arrives there unprepared has a hard first term.