etwinning 2015: Beautiful Places On My Island, German Presentation, Part One

"Beautiful places on an island", that is what we keep in mind when we dream about a relaxed and funny vacation. Today my chemistry class 7c presented some German islands in the North Sea and in the Baltic Sea with locations they had declared as a beautiful place from their point of view. And they added some pictures and information about how people on these German islands get their tap water from.
Today their guests were Mikhail Bukhtoyarov and Anna Bukhtoyarova from Siberia, Russia. They loved their presentations and their creativity to prepare each single slide.

The students became ambassadors of their country representing Germany to an international audience. The Kahoot Quizz at the end of the whole presentation awoke interest during the whole event.

This was the first of about six presentations the students from grade 7 will do throughout the next few weeks at different days and different times in German and English. The whole project is accepted by the European Commission as an etwinning project. Look at the following presentation to get a view what happened this morning in the chemistry room:

Thank you very much Mr. and Mrs Bukhtoyarov from Russia.

The other class, grade 7, will do their German presentations tomorrow at 06.15 am GMT:

https://plus.google.com/events/cnk92inscu7ahknq9ghmj3lum6g?authkey=COngwprZhMSn8gE

"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.

Contact

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.

Mardi Gras at Realschule Sundern on 12th February 2015

Mardi Gras (a phrase from the United States, originally French and set up by French settlers after they settled to the United States some centuries ago) is named "Karneval" or "Fasching" in Germany.

It starts every year on 11th  November at 11.11am and ends on Ash Wednesday , about 40 days after Christmas with the begining of the lent time. The final week of this period - sometimes called "the 5th Season" in Germany - is characterized by lots of traditional celebrations, colourful and fun events with costumed people singing funny songs and telling jokes. This final week starts at Womens' Carneval Thursday a week before Ash Wednesday. It was on the 12th February this year.
That Thursday we celebrated our traditional Karneval at school like we had done before each year for some decades now. Students and teachers came to school that morning with costumes. After three regular lessons according to the classes'  time tables all students and teachers met at the assembly hall to celebrate Karneval by singing and dancing.
In the first and third lesson that day students from two classes, grade 10 and grade 5, had a costume competition to find out the best costume in each class. It was not only the best costume but also the best presentation of the costume. Like in an ice skating competition. The students presented their costumes and had to act like they were dressed.

An international jury of teachers and students joined these presentations by Google Hangout to vote for each presentation simultaniously on a prepared Google sheet. The final score was counted automatically by the system and the winner was proclaimed straight after the last voting.

The jury members were from all continents. Some of them hadn't seen such costumes before.

Thank you very much to the "HLW skypers" teachers' community by which most of the jury members were found. But also to the other guests that morning taking their time to judge costumes and presentations:
Wilma Johansson and her students' team, Alneskolan, Oernskoeldsvik, Sweden.
Govinda Prasad Panthy, Shantideep Adarsh Vidhyasadan-School, Lalitpur, Kathmandu Valley, Nepal.
Claudia Müller, Napier, New Zealand.
Kim Piot, International Community School, Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Maria Colussa, Santa Fe, Argentina.
Sebastian Panakal,Kochi, India.
Ancy Anand,Philoo Benyamin, Assisi Vidyaniketan Public School, Kakkanad, Kochi, India.
Lin-Lin Tan, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Lyudmila Golubeva,Lyceum 1, Kansk, Russia.
Dondi Thotne Ban Gyöngyi, Primary School Balatonboglár, Balatonboglár, Hungary.

German Students grade 7 until grade 9 received their certificates of completion from the American Sally Ride Foundation

"Sally Ride Science is an innovative science content company dedicated to supporting girls' and boys' interests in science, math, engineering, and technology. Sally Ride Science manages the Sally Ride EarthKAM program.

Sally Ride EarthKAM (Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) is a NASA educational outreach program that enables students, teachers, and the public to learn about Earth from the unique perspective of space. During Sally Ride EarthKAM missions (periods when the Sally Ride EarthKAM camera is operational), middle school students around the world request images of specific locations on Earth. The entire collection of Sally Ride EarthKAM images is available in a searchable Sally Ride EarthKAM image archive. This image collection and accompanying activities are extraordinary resources to engage students in Earth and space science, geography, social studies, mathematics, communications, and art.

The project was initiated by Dr. Sally Ride, America’s first woman in space, in 1995 and called KidSat. The KidSat camera flew on three space shuttle flights (STS 76, 81, and 86) to test its feasibility. In 1998, the program was renamed EarthKAM. The EarthKAM camera flew on two more shuttle flights (STS 89 and 99) before moving to the International Space Station (ISS) on Expedition 1 in 2001. Sally Ride died in 2012, and in 2013, NASA renamed the program Sally Ride EarthKAM. The Sally Ride EarthKAM camera remains a permanent payload on the ISS, supporting about four missions annually."

The Sally Ride EarthKAM Mission Operations Center (MOC) is located at UCSD, the University of San Diego, in California. The students had to learn how to apply for a picture using this computer  Before that they had to search for a certain location the picture should be taken from the orbit. High quality knowledge in geography and maths were necessary to apply for the expected photo and to focus on the corselett the picture usually shows. The accepted picture requests will be delivered to the NASA - Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas. They uplink the requests to the Sally Ride EarthKAM. The NASA - Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is responsible for the image processing and the image archive. All pictures taken by this camera are stored at this archive and available for all paticipating students.

Several students from my classes took part to the November 2014 mission this year and got their certificates of completion this morning.  

They hope to reinforce their vocational applications later when they are school's finalists. Congratulations to all participants. 


The next mission is actually dated for 27th January - 31st January 2015.

Students grade 7 until 10 joined the "Matheletics 2014" with success

Some of my students joined this international Maths competition this year. Set up by members of "LivingMaths", a NGO in Capetown, South Africa, they took their chance to reach most of the 20 points available for this test.

Originally created for students in South Africa and in Africa in general this test raised up to an international competition far beyond the African continent border. More than 200000 students joined this test this year.







This morning they got their certificates from "LivingMaths"- coordinator Steve Sherman, who himself joined this session from the distance using Skype. The best students at my school received 18 by 20 points this year.

Steve Sherman especially honours the results of this students' competition, because the test was printed and offered in English, which is not the students' mother tongue.

Congratulations to Jule and Eliana and all 38 certified students.