An Exciting Week of Science: Exploring Nature, Chemistry, and the Universe

For our excursion week this year, the 7th graders participated in natural science workshops and experiments. We started the week with two days at school, during which we attended four different workshops. The first workshop was about flying, where we learned a lot about airplanes and how to make small-scale models. We even tested our airplanes in a competition to see which one would fly the longest. That was exciting! Another workshop was in Chemistry, where we conducted experiments to reveal the pigments in leaves or Smarties and learned how to separate them. It looked amazing when we did it, and we all had a lot of fun trying it out.

In the Physics workshop, we had the chance to build our own Galileo Galilei telescope. It worked, of course, and we were able to see everything up close. The last workshop was in Biology, where we had a variety of tasks, including an escape room challenge and working with microscopes. It was fascinating to observe things at a much larger scale.

Those were the first two days. On the third day, we went to Jena to visit the Imaginata, where we saw more experiments, some of which taught us about optics. On Thursday morning, we watched two films, from which we learned a lot about flight and its origins, as well as about the universe and its creation. Then came the highlight: that same day, we went to the planetarium in Schneeberg. There, we were given a virtual tour of the universe, stars, and our planets. We even got to observe the sun through two telescopes! Fun fact: the largest telescope in Saxony is in Schneeberg.

On the final day, we worked in groups on our assigned tasks, and then the excursion week came to an end. It was a wonderful week, and we learned a lot about natural science.