School information
- School name
- Ernst-Reuter-Schule Dietzenbach
- School year
- 2025-2026
- School website
- City
- Dietzenbach
- Country
- Germany
- Sea basin
- North Sea
- Region
- Inland: >20 km from the sea
Project information
- Project name in native language
- Save the Ocean – Unser Wasser, Unsere Zukunft
- Starting date of the project
- End date of the project
- Project website
- Categories
- Biodiversity
The project connects students’ everyday lives with the health of the ocean by exploring the interactions between land, freshwater systems, and the sea. The goal is to show how human activities on land influence marine ecosystems, and to raise awareness for a responsible relationship with water and the sea. The school implemented a new curriculum for 8th Grade MINT class focused on ocean literacy, ending with an excursion to Hallig Hooge on the North Sea coast where students connect theory with practice. During workshops in cooperation with the Okeanos Foundation for the Sea, 5th-graders explore marine ecosystems, biodiversity, and water pollution through experiments,
storytelling, and interactive educational formats. Supported by 8th-graders, each class explores a different ecosystem and documents their new knowledge through drawings on a patch. The whole patchwork is presented by the students themselves to all grade 5 students. For the yearly World Water Days, older MINT-students create on the topic of “clean water” experiments for younger students, like water filtration and limescale deposits, and together develop their own water filtration systems. They also craft a whale shaped trash bin for returnable bottles to raise awareness of plastic waste.
For the interdisciplinary project on “ocean, clean water, and ocean governance”, the elective courses “MINT” and “democratic learning” worked together and produced videos, podcasts, class presentations, and organized a podium discussion. 9th-grade geography students test whether microplastics are detectable in the local brook (“Biberbach”). They take water samples and analyze them in the school laboratory using Nile red staining to detect microplastics. By planting pea seeds in soil with and without microplastic, they investigate the impacts of microplastics and discuss possible effects on the environment and health. Older students deepen their knowledge and understanding through excursions, for example by visiting the local Senckenberg Museum of Natural History Frankfurt.