Report by the 11d Journaling Team

The Nelson Mandela School has once again come together to create and celebrate another successful Ubuntu week (23-27 April 2018). While participating in several activities for the environment, discussing current topics and decorating the different campuses, the students of the Nelson Mandela School have rediscovered the meaning of Ubuntu.This South African word represents the idea that humans are all in constant communication and communion with others and their environment. Ubuntu teaches us to be connected, improve the community and have a mutual caring for everyone around us. 

When visiting the Irving Penn exhibition in her leisure time, Ruby Richter, year 9 student, had a sudden inspiration to take a portrait photo of her grandmother. She shared her independent project with me and I asked her to present her idea to the school community.
Florentine Baumann

The photograph I took of my grandmother is inspired by Irving Penn’s work “Girl with tobacco on her tongue”, originally from 1951. I call mine “Girl with tobacco on her tongue 50 years later”. Irving Penn is a very inspiring photographer and I find his work highly impressive. Recreating one of his works was quite tricky because it was vey easy to miss little details, like the position of the fingers or the angle of the head but all in all I think my grandma and I did a pretty good job.
Ruby Richter (9b)

The idea of the garden project came to me as I first started working at NMS a year ago, back in May of 2017. Now a year later with a lot of hard work and the help of several colleagues and students we finally have our own vegetable garden. The project is supposed to continue. I have planned for it to grow even larger and eventually include all the children of the Primary at Pfalzburger Str. 23 and hopefully the entire community of NMS. That’s exactly what’s happening! I now have the whole community talking to me from all three campuses. Asking me how they can be involved and if they can help in any way and I think that’s fantastic! If there is only one thing that this garden does, and that’s to get the communty talking across to each other, then I think that’s great! As I believe at this point in time at NMS there is nothing more crucial to the progression of our school than communication!

More pictures below!

From February 26th until March 19th 2018 I collected and donated clothes to a shelter named ‘Bahnhofsmission’, located under the station Zoologischer Garten. This shelter helps out the homeless and the less-fortunate by providing food, clothes, and shelter; organized primarily by the people of Berlin.

Over the course of 4 weeks I went collected clothes, that came mostly from my myself and my family, as we have lots of clothes laying around that are too small or do not wear anymore. Otherwise I also collected clothes from classmates from our school, and the Nelson Mandela community as a whole.

Starting in January, I collected clothes over a course of three weeks for my IB CAS project. Many clothes came from my own family including, siblings, cousins, parents, etc., however I had also asked friends and people from Nelson Mandela School to participate and donate clothes.Over the time period of the CAS project many different individuals were willing and able to donate some clothes, including jackets, t-shirts and trousers. The difficult part was collecting mainly new clothes and if not new, clothes in very good condition to be donated. The reason being that these clothes would then ultimately be donated to a refugee home.

Food waste is not a topic that seems to be addressed very often. Below is a short, creative 3 minute video on its global impact, some interesting facts as well as ways to improve the issue. This is a CAS project that I, as an IB13 student decided to conduct as I think it needs more attention than it gets. The intensions are to raise awareness and getting you to think twice about the the next time you throw any sort of food away. I hope you enjoy the video.
Kind Regards
Lisa, IB 13, 2018

During Ubuntu Week, a main focus will be Fashion Revolution; with a presentation, fashion show, various upcycling workshops and a Clothing Swap Party as some of its highlights, taking place at all three campuses.

Raid your closets and bring your best old clothes to school this week! Drop them off in Flex A – room 207 from Monday 16.4. onward and immediately get your tokens. You will receive Swap tokens, which you can use to select other garments, shoes or accesories at the Swap Party at P23 on Tuesday 24th.

Tuesday, April 24th 2 PM – come to the Clothing Swap at P23 between 2-4 pm, bring your tokens and go home with some new garments! Drop off your lovely old garments at room 207 in the week before to get tokens. Max 5 pieces pp. Larger accesories and shoes are welcome! Take part in one of the many great upcycling workshops that will be on offer between 2-4 PM.

Volunteer wanted to bring left-over clothing to the Stadtmission at Hauptbahnhof, at any time between 25-27 April. Also wanted; four (CAS?) volunteer students to help during the Clothing Swap (starting at 12 PM on Tuesday 24th). For both; please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Description of the project

Hello, my name is Zena Marijewko and for my IB CAS project I drove down to Seeheim-Jugenheim in the federal state of Hesse and conducted historical diary entries about my grandmother who suffers from Alzheimer’s, a severe form of dementia. The purpose of these entries is to raise awareness of the condition, however, with a personal insight. I conducted the entries by going to Seeheim for four consecutive weeks (ending during the Easter holiday) in which I visited my grandmother once or twice each time, depending on the duration of my stay.

Am 23. und 24. Januar 2018 fanden im Tischtennis die Wettkämpfe der Berliner Schulen in den WK 0, WK II und WK III bei den Mädchen und Jungen statt.

Das Team der Mädchen startete im WK O (jahrgangsoffen) und gewann im Berliner Finale mit 5:1 Punkten gegen die Ernst-Abbe-Schule. Herzlichen Glückwunsch an Maike Neubert, Fanny Tockner, Lydia Rose, Leila Bittner Rosser und Rosalie Borkowski.

Nelson Mandela School’s first ever student led career day took place on Saturday the 3rd of March 2018. The few students that did attend were treated to a variety of career presentations and talks by parents and friends. Students got to hear about life at Coca Cola, computer programming, a dual studium at Mercedes, Politics, Law, working internationally (diplomatically/development organisations) and much more!

On the 22^nd of February three students from the NMS had the opportunity to cook with 19-year-old star Chef Flynn McGarry from New York. The movie is about Flynn who started cooking and creating new dishes at a very young age. Flynn is a 15-year-old revolutionary. This culinary experience is something we will remember the next time we prepare a minimalistic gourmet dish. By the time Flynn was 10, he had transformed his parents’ house into a restaurant called Eureka, cooking several course menus for his family and friends. 

Dear Nelson Mandela community
Dear Debating Matters Group

This year our debating team (Alec, James, Naomi and Yara) were tasked again with a debate that was hosted by Freiblickinstitut e.V. and the University of Applied Sciences Europe in a lovely venue in Mitte.

12 Berliner gymnasiums were invited to participate. Each school had to prepare for four debates and to win at least two of the debates in order to get into the semi-finals.

Our school won one of the debates and lost one. The first debate was “Monuments of controversial historical figures should remain”. Our team was debating for the motion. In the second debate on “Social media Sites should filter out fake news stories”, our team was given the position against the motion. Our team defended both positions gloriously.