Since 5 years our school works in cooperation with the Olympic centres and established special classes for the young people who are successful in sports, especially volleyball and karate.

We have a large sport ground, a gym and many rooms for the different subjects:

• Kitchen
• Rooms for handicraft
• Computer lab
• Rooms for the Sciences
• Art department
• Music department

We have got only one computer room as we usually transport our notebooks in special wagons to the classroom were we can work with them. On every floor there is at least one of these wagons. Every classroom is connected via our central server to the internet.

We also have our school homepage (www.gsr-fn.de) where you can find a lot of more information about our school.

Our students come from 38 different nations from all over the world. We are proud to be host of so many people from so many different countries. But we also take part in many international activities. So we worked in different Comenius-projects with schools from Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Spain and Turkey.

We have close relations to School No. 16 in Belarus and have students’ exchanges with this school every year. Another yearly activity is the trips to London for students from grade 7 and 8. As we are close to the Alps we also do skiing excursions to Switzerland and Austria. In grade 6 our students stay in the mountains for one week where all of them learn skiing.

Another aspect of our curriculum is to take up responsibilities for the environment. We try to save energy as much as possible, equipped our gym with solar cells, divide the waste in different fractions and are checked every year by specialists which make sure that we meet the requirement of the European Ecological Audit (EMAS = Eco Management and Audit Scheme).

Beside our international relations and the ecological approach we also have a lot of social activities. Our school was the first in the whole area to start the “Compassion Project”. Students of grade nine go to an institution of social welfare (old people’s home, house of the homeless people, nursery schools, schools and homes for the disabled) where they work for one week. The purpose of this project is not to give a work experience (we also do that in grade 9 but in the different firms here) but to bring our students in contact with people who they usually don’t meet and to create a better understanding for those whose life isn’t as theirs in many different aspects.

Since ten years we cooperate with the Paulinenstift. Our students regularly go there, help the seniors living there in many ways. Sometimes they just do games with them, read the newspaper for them or talk with them. Sometimes they take the people sitting in wheelchairs to an event in town, e.g. the Christmas Market, sometimes they prepare cookies together with them, give a small concert or do other activities.

Another aspect of our school life which also concerns the social awareness are the tasks students take over in daily school life. Older students act as mentors in different subjects and help younger students with problems in English or Maths, but also offer sport clubs or hobby clubs. We have also a Red Cross squad formed by our students. Every week another group is on duty and if somebody is feeling ill, has hurt himself or if there is an accident in the PE lesson they do the first aid and take the person to the doctor.

A third very important group is our mediation group. Specially trained students try to solve minor conflicts between other students. In our experience t is often better that students are the ones to help in conflicts between other students than teachers.

All these things are part of the motto of our school: “Take up responsibility for yourself, for others and for the world around you”.

I hope I could give you some information about the Graf-Soden-Realschule. Further information you can on the following websites:

Some of our most important companies: