Dear school community,
We would like to invite you to our music evening on 02.07.2025 at 18:00 in the Aula (P30). On this evening, the NMS-PopChoir and the school orchestra as well as some soloists will present a colorful program of pop and film music. We look forward to spending a musical time together with you and getting in the mood for the summer vacations.
NMS-PopChoir and orchestra
Ira Brauns, Elisabeth Baumann, Axel Fischer and Felix Theuner
Our school was founded in 2000. Thanks to everyone's efforts, it has gained a good reputation as a bilingual, international, diverse school over the years. To mark the anniversary, we cordially invite you to our summer festival on Friday, 11 July 2025, from 10:30 am to 3 pm in the schoolyard of our Pfalzburger Straße 30 site. You can expect a colourful programme and lots of conversation. We look forward to seeing you there!
Due to the anniversary celebrations, there will be no lessons at our school on this day. Emergency supervision for our primary school pupils is guaranteed at Pfalzburger Straße 23.
School management of the Nelson Mandela School
On 16.6.53, the German-Dutch author Lutz van Dijk was a guest at the NMS for the third time as part of German lessons. In the assembly hall, he described his exciting life journey from Berlin via Hamburg, the USA to Amsterdam and the township of Masiphumelele near Cape Town to the 9th graders. There he founded “Hokisa” in 2001, a home for children and young people who are directly affected by Aids and need help. To mark the anniversary of the Soweto Rising, he read an excerpt from his latest book “ Afrika – Geschichte und Vielfalt eines Kontinents ”, a memoir by the sister of Hector Petersen, who was shot dead during the demonstrations on June 16, 1976. The students were very impressed. We thank the „Friends“ for their generous support and hope to be able to invite Lutz van Dijk again next year. (The photo is from his last visit in 2023).
On June 4, 2025, the NMS-PopChoir of the Nelson Mandela School took part in the 3rd Berlin School Choir Award at the FEZ Berlin with great success - and was awarded the prize for the best groove!
The choir impressed both the jury and the audience with their palpable enthusiasm for the stage, rhythmic precision and strong musical expression. The timing and interplay of the singers was particularly emphasized - the “groove” that gave the performance its special energy.
The award is a wonderful recognition of the intensive rehearsal work and a result that the choir students under the direction of Felix Theuner and Elisabeth Baumann can be proud of.
From AI and gambling addiction to TikTok algorithms, online art and smartphone use; this year’s 10th-grade students have explored a wide range of fascinating media topics. Now it’s time to share their insights!
You’re warmly invited to join us for the annual NMS Media Fair, where students will present their projects, share their perspectives and invite discussion.
A special invitation goes out to grades 5 - 6 and all students in years 7 - 9. Come listen, learn and participate. We look forward to seeing you there!
On May 23 2025, this year's Fashion Revolution Day took place at the NMS secondary school. Due to the Easter vacations and various other school activities and public holidays, this important day of remembrance had to be postponed by about a month. On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh, where cheap clothing for the rich industrialized nations was produced under catastrophic working conditions, collapsed. Over 1100 people were buried under the rubble of the dilapidated building. With Fashion Revolution Day, we remind the school community of this tragedy by upcycling discarded clothing with the students, embellishing old clothes with iron-on designs or swapping clothes. In this way, we extend the life cycle of clothing and counteract fast fashion. Our aim is to develop an awareness of clothing consumption in the school community. This year, it was primarily ninth and tenth graders who were involved. We hope that we can open up the activity day again next year and make it accessible to a wider audience.My special thanks go to Franziska Wandtke and Anna Jones, as well as the external experts Birgit M'Pandzou and Wilfried Pletzinger, who supported me throughout the day.
Florentine Baumann
Class 8c of the NMS has been taking part in the Querklang project since November 2024, creating a performance and premiering it at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele on March 25. The project is organized by Kerstin Wiehe and accompanied by Felix Theuner within the music lessons.
Throughout the project, the two artists Romy and Julius visited us once a week in our double music lesson and worked together with us in three groups on artistic experiments: Drama, Music and 3D. For inspiration, all groups traveled together in the U3 and observed and documented everyday situations. The members of the drama group came up with several scenes from the subway. One part of the music group worked on sound effects and imitated the sounds of the subway, while the other part wrote a song for our play. The members of the 3D group first experimented with graffiti and then created a backdrop using chairs, paper, pens and sticky tape. They also depicted the subway stations in the performance. After weeks of practice in the auditorium and various rooms, we were able to premiere our performance on March 25, 2025 at a concert in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele as part of the Maerz-Musik
We really enjoyed this project and would like to repeat something like this and continue to develop our own works creatively and as a group in class, as we are now very familiar with the stage and stage presence. We would like to thank our helpers Romy and Julius and our teacher Felix Theuner for making it all
Class 8c
We are proud to report that our two readers Adriana Kindt (7a) and Lea Shretah (6c) took first and second place in the UNESCO reading competition on !0 April 2025. Both impressed with their rehearsed text as well as when reading the foreign text with a confident and special presentation.
The theme of the competition was "other worlds". After welcoming all the schools taking part from Berlin, the order of the readers was drawn by lot. The excitement grew and all participants had about 2 minutes to read the prepared text passage from their own book. Lea read an extract from "Warrior Cats" and Adriana read a passage from "Treasure Island". The audience was also able to observe how captivatingly both read aloud.
After a break, another book was presented, from which unpractised passages were read aloud. Here, too, both NMS readers shone with a particularly fluent reading and an emphasis that seemed rehearsed. Lea and Adriana therefore definitely deserved their first two places.
The readers from the other schools also produced some great readings. Many thanks also to the Ernst Reuter School for organising this fantastic event.
Lara Zaske
On 20.03.2025, the berlin championship of schools in rapid chess took place for students without club membership. Seven school teams took part in the tournament, which was played in the auditorium of Andreas-Gymnasium.
In 6 tournament rounds, the challenge was to play as successfully as possible in 15 minutes. See picture, from left - Benedikt (11c), Robin (Abi Q4), Tonio (Abi Q4) and Franciszek (11b) once again achieved an exceptional result.
In the exciting, sometimes tricky games, our team scored 11 out of a possible 12 points and won an excellent 1st place ahead of H.-Hertz-Gymnasium and K.-Kollwitz-Gymnasium. Congratulations!
From March 27 to 31, 2025, a 21-member Chinese delegation of art teachers from ten different provinces visited Berlin to get an insight into what cultural education has to offer. A visit to the Nelson Mandela School on March 26 kicked off with a visit to a class in the “Textile Art and Design” profile course (Y9). Afterwards, the profile and concept of the Nelson Mandela School and in particular the interdisciplinary potential of art lessons were presented. The group was then accompanied on a sightseeing tour in Berlin-Mitte. On March 27, we had planned a project day with two artists in Charlottenburg Palace and on the premises of the Community Art School Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf (JKS CW), which was successfully carried out. Afterwards, the delegation visited other museums in Berlin. On March 28, the Chinese art teachers accompanied us to the Neue Nationalgalerie, where a training session on strategies for interpreting pictures was held for them. The Chinese guests were impressed by the curricular possibilities that our school system offers to teachers, and by the wide range of low-cost offers from Berlin's cultural institutions. The Chinese teachers all run private youth art schools that give children and young people in their home country access to art production and individual artistic expression.
Florentine Baumann (Head of the Art Department)
Our students continued their success at the Jugend forscht state competition held at TU Berlin. Tom Smee (IB 12) won first prize in Mathematics/Computer Science for his project “Can synthetically generated training data improve AI object recognition models?” and has qualified for the national finals in Hamburg from May 31 to June 1 – an outstanding achievement!
The two other teams from Nelson Mandela School each achieved a 3rd place in their respective categories – a remarkable accomplishment at the state level:
In addition, the Nelson Mandela School received a special award of 500 euros in recognition of its ongoing commitment to supporting young researchers through Jugend forscht.
Congratulations to all participants, and best of luck to Tom at the national finals in Hamburg!
Reading aloud is fun! Under this motto, the best readers from each of the five German learning groups in Year 7 competed against each other in the P30 Aula on March 26 2025. Following the thematic focus “Andere Welten”, the students had selected suitable passages from Ende's “Die unendliche Geschichte”, Kinney's “Gregs Tagebuch”, Bertram's “Biber undercover”, Carroll's “Alice im Wunderland” and Stevenson's “Die Schatzinsel” and performed them in a rousing manner. Each student then had to spontaneously read an unknown excerpt from Cornelia Funke's novel “Herr der Diebe”, and the students also mastered this challenge with aplomb.
The jury, made up of students from 10c, listened very carefully and paid particular attention to the reading technique, interpretation and choice of text. After the presentations, they briefly withdrew to deliberate and finally presented the eagerly awaited results. Third place went to Johanna (7b) and second place to Aarav (7c). The jury was most impressed by the performance of Adriana (7a), who now has the honor of representing our school at the Berlin UNESCO Schools Competition at the Berlin Wall Memorial in April. Congratulations!
