"School of Future"

Our school named "Realschule Sundern" in Germany was certified and honoured by members of the State's Ministry last Friday, 20th March 2015, for the third successive time. The school is now allowed to call itself "School of Future" again.

"School of Future" ambassadors from our school.

During a ceremony at a school in Marsberg, Germany, Pia, Noelle, Almedina, Leonie and Sophie as well as Marie and me as their teacher went to the stage to receive the certificates, door plates for the school and a flag from the President of the State's Ministry of Environmental Affairs, Mr. Thomas Delschen, from Ferdi Lenze, vize county commissioner and from Martina Nolte, schools inspector of the county.

Walking on the stage, they received the certificate
and all the other pleasant things

The honoured schools themselves prepared this ceremony with music and dancing performances. That morning 26 schools and 25 partner institutes in our county were honoured for their educational work. Mentioning the main idea "learning within networks" the jury certified those schools and partners which had taken strong effords to realize this main idea at their school and institutes between 2012 and 2015 successfully. Years ago already there was set up a network in our county named "commonly active in the HSK" (HSK: the abbreviation of our county: Hochsauerlandkreis). This network had been build up out of schools and extracurricular education providers. They have offered certain services for schools to educate the students outside the regular classes at school.

These 6 ladies were representing lots of students at our school,
working and learning within networks.

Education for global sustainable development  at different aspects will be successful only, if the youth today (who will be the adults from tomorrow!) will be educated with additional experts, learning in networks. To discuss global problems and to search for common solutions of these and to motivate teachers, students and whole classes for sustainable development successfully. This was our task to express with our contribution to be honoured finally.

Originally created by our students' radio station "Radio Rasant" where students from different countries are collaborating to prepare common radio transmissions, this idea has been spread around at our school meanwhile and has already reached several classes and subjects at different levels.

from the right: Stefanie Horn, Dr. Thomas Delschen,
Martina Nolte, Ferdi Lenze, Reinhard Marx

That is the reason why we could present the "Radio Rasant" project last Friday as well as the "Lunchboxproject" as a second example we did last year already (some of you might remember about that!) for the second time.  Students from Nepal, Australia, India, the USA, Indonesia, Taiwan, Brazil, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Russia and students from grade 7 at our school took pictures from their lunchboxes, presented them by videoconferencing to their partners and discussed aspects of nutrition and food shortage.

They took their chance to record some interviews.

All schools got the chance to present their projects at a little exhibition straight before the ceremony started. Interested teachers from everywhere in our county and members of the extracurricular providers were walking around and got a lot of information about collaboration at our school, mentioning HLW- Skypers and other networks we use to get in touch with other classes and teachers from abroad. Finally we also mentioned this excellent opportunities to implement English language into another subject.



The state's campagne to strengthen sustainable development education at schools will go on. And we will go on teaching using learning networks with teachers, students and experts from abroad. More than 400 teachers and experts are connected to our school meanwhile. Thank you very much to all of you who have supported us doing this extraordinary kind of learning.

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This year our school is celebrating its 90th birthday. A lot of events are planed to celebrate this anniversary and to light a beacon of quality education. To reach this aim permanently you have to keep abreast of new ways of education you usually become aware of, but also by passing in review about what you have done the years before.

This time ( we usually celebrate our anniversaries every 5 years!) we had a new idea celebrating our anniversary. Inviting former students to our school  teaching our students today about former kind of school life about 25 years ago we wanted to remind our guests about what they had experienced during their stay at our school. And they gave our students today the opportunity to compare and esteem actual education processes. Some aspects of modern history were mentioned as far as they had influenced school life those days.

A team of teachers were set up to do all the preparations including the search for former students. Looking for certain adults we got the information about 2 former students who live outside Germany and outside Europe today. One is living in the USA and another one in New Zealand. It is curious to mention that these both ladies are from the same final year in 1990 and they were both attending the same classes. Leaving Germany years ago they lost sight of each other for about 25 years now.

Until last week, when they met again with some teachers from our school, their former teachers and the schools' pricipal, the vize principal and me, in a Google Hangout videoconference in my classroom late in the evening. Because there is a small time slot only to cover all time differences without trouble.
There was a lot to talk about. And all together they remind each other about what was going on in the late 80s of the last century. And we presented some actual slides from their 'old school' how it looks like today.

But sometimes all teachers were quiet and listened to what these two ladies from abroad had to talk about to each other, 25 years after their last contact. The whole session took about 1 hour time before all participants went their seperate ways again: in the USA, in New Zealand and in Germany were we left for home finally.

Read Aloud Day 2015

First time ever our school took part at the Read Aloud Day campagne on 4th March 2015 this year. And we took part with two events that day: one in the morning and one in the afternoon, one in German language and one in English. However, we decided to spread literature from our local areas around and got a deep view into German, Italian and English literature from Germany, Italy and the United States.




The morning session with Sabina Vecchione Grüner and her students was implemented into the GFL campagne itself. German language students from class 2 at the Franscesco- Petrarca- Gymnasium in Trieste, Italy, introduced themselves by a short video.

Das Francesco-Petrarca-Gymnasium from Sabina Vecchione Grüner on Vimeo.

After that they presented the poem "Trieste" by the Italian Author Umberto Saba and finally some pages of the criminal story " Die Toten vom Karst" by Veit Heinichen, who is actually living in Trieste.

The German students from class 7b at my school (Realschule Sundern, Germany) introduced themselves (our country and our school) first.







After that they presented one of the most famous childrens' poems, nearly every child in Germany has to learn during its elementary school years: "Squire von Ribbeck at Ribbeck in Havelland", by Theodor Fontane, to the Italian audience.

This poem shows every day  life in Germany about 200 years ago and implements former German language dialect phrases from that period of time.

Only 10 kilometers far from our German school Kathrin Heinrichs was born in Dörnholthausen in 1970. The class 7b kids read the first chapter of  the German criminal story  "Fahrt ins Grüne"  (Trip Into The Countryside) by  Kathrin Heinrichs, one of the most famous criminal story writers in Germany. We prepared some slides for the Italian partners from Trieste with phrases and some pictures from Kathrin Heinrichs' school, she attended when she was a child, which figure out the content of that part of the story.