A POWERFUL AND FULLY PACKED KIDPOWER WORKSHOP!!!

As the Berkeley Turkish School we hosted our first Kid Power seminar this past weekend. We had an amazing turnout, 36 parents and friends of BTS attended. Everyone was fully engaged with the valuable techniques that Zoe shared with us. At the end of our seminar we received many requests from our parents to continue the series, so we have began the planning of the next seminar already!  Thank you all for coming and taking part in this important seminar!

In the event you have missed this workshop, we purchased 4 books from Kid Power for our library.  2 of which are great comic books for you to read with your children. The other two books are excellent guides on what adults need to know about bullying.

If you like and endorse events like our educational parent seminars, we encourage you to support our Fall Fundraising Event so we can continue them at a lower cost to our community.

October 9th Weekend

We spent some outdoors time finishing off the day with lots of games outside. It was yet another beautiful fall weather.  We thank many families who have began donating to support our fall fundraising! Here are some scenes from the garden as well as from inside of our classrooms.

Scenes from our first October class

This weekend Gulten Hanim's Elma Agaci classroom had a visit from our science teacher Dr. Taliha Pasaoglu. Here are some scenes from our first October Sunday.

Scenes from our third class

It was a very hot day in Berkeley Turkish School this past Sunday. While the parents enjoyed great conversations underneath the redwood tree over coffee there was buzzing energy in the classrooms. Here are some scenes from our day.

Checking out books from our brand new library!

Today was the first day where our students checked out their first BTS library books and went home with their new canvas bags. Hurray to new books, new stories, andnew beginings! Here are some scenes from today, enjoy!

Cheers to a great beginning at BTS!

Cheers to a great beginning of the 2016-2017 Academic year at the Berkeley Turkish School. It was a fun day full of great energy, excitement and many new faces. We thank all of those, especially our teachers, who have been working really hard in the background to prepare for this great start. We have 49 students registered for the fall semester. Thank you on behalf of the Berkeley Turkish School for joining our growing community where we teach culture through creativity. Here's a few scenes from our first day.

ONLY TWO DAYS LEFT TO REGISTER!!!!

We will be opening the doors of our school in two days, and we already have 45 students registered!!!

If you haven't done so, please register online so our teachers prepare for their classrooms.

Looking forward to seeing everyone at the school at 10.

Remember to arrive early!

A great turnout at our Open House today!

The mission of our school

Approach to education

Our Program Director Guney Registering Parents

We are very excited about the great energy and new faces that joined our school today at our open house and registration event. We also thank everyone for coming and registering their children as well as helping us prepare for this special day.

It is no doubt that this will be a very exciting new academic year at the Berkeley Turkish School. WE have a lot of newness and The number of students registered so far is the best turnout we have had since we opened our doors.   If you haven't registered yet, please do so online this week, so our teachers can prepare their class materials in advance.

Looking forward to seeing everybody on September 11th, our first day of classes!

New Shipment for our New Library

We are very excited as we just received our new shipment of our books for our new library from Turkey today. As we are preparing for our Open House & Registration on August 27th, we are inviting you all to begin registering your child on our website today. This will help our teachers plan better for September 11th, when the first day of school begins. Looking forward to seeing you and your family this fall at the Berkeley Turkish School! For More information regardin

Building our School's Library

Hello! We hope you are having a great summer!

This semester we are very excited to start our own school library! During the summer we were busy purchasing great Turkish Books for our students to read as a part of our school's curriculum during the semester. The cargo boxes began arriving and we are busy uploading the amazing selection to our online digital library. We have also established a great relationship with a bookstore in Izmir, who will be shipping us our books as we order new sets.

This semester each classroom will have their own library and BTS students will be able to checkout books.

If you would like to see our online library here is it link:

http://btslibrary.libib.com/

We are uplading new books as they arrive, and hope to be growing this great library with the help of our community. If you have any books that are in good condition, please bring them with your child to your classroom teachers. We are happy to add them into our library!

June Curriculum Meeting with our growing teaching team

Yesterday we held our June Curriculum Meeting with our Berkeley Turkish School teachers. Among us were our new teachers who will be joining us in the fall making this team one strong power house! Our teaching staff will be busy over the summer revising and re-designing our school's curriculum by incorporating the feedback from our survey results that our program coordinator Guney shared. We are excited ever more about the upcoming fall semester at BTS. Stay tuned for our early registration dates!

Celebrating together the ending of another year at Berkeley Turkish School

This past Sunday was our graduation ceremony at the Berkeley Turkish School as we celebrated the end of another year full of adventures, changes and festivals.

On behalf of the Berkeley Turkish School we wanted to say a big thank you to our students, parents, teachers and to our extended community for supporting us in our efforts to grow together as a community school. We could not have gotten this far without your endless support in believing in us and joining hands in achieving our mission.

In the next few weeks we will email more details about some exciting changes that we are planning for the fall semester to add better value to our education at BTS. Please stay tuned for early registration which will be opening in a few weeks.  Our open house will be held on August 27th, and our first day of fall semester classes will begin on September 11th, 2016.

Have a lovely summer and hope to see you and your family in the fall !

Educational Products Designed for Berkeley Turkish School

This Sunday, we had quite the excitement! Basak Altan’s California College of Arts Industrial Design Students delivered their final products that they have been developing during the course of the year in partnership with the Engage Program.   BTS students have been providing feedback on the products that focused on teaching culture through creativity. As a result, today was the day to receive the hand-over of these amazing games and educational tools that BTS will cherish during the semesters to come. One of the games, designed by Patrick Hill, was called a Mariner’s Odyssey exploring the coastal waters of Anatolia while the other was focusing on Turkish cuisine, designed by Bobbie Morris & LingFeng Hua.

Gulten Hanim’s class travelled from San Francisco to Istanbul with a plane that Gulten Hanim drew- Ofcourse they had their tickets and Turkish Lira’s ready.  Taliha Hanim, our science teacher, demonstrated lab experiments showing the buoyancy of salt water vs fresh water. Hopefully all of this will be handy information while some of our students are preparing to head off to the Mediterranean with their families.

Celebrating Mothers' Day At the Berkeley Turkish School

This Sunday as we celebrated our mothers, there was something magical in the air at the Berkeley Turkish School. Lots of laughter, hugs, handmade gifts and some tears of joy were exchanged.  The third classroom gave their mothers apricot jams that they had prepared with a ceremony, while the second group surprised their moms with their meticulously handmade vases with flowers inside. Our Berkeley Turkish School moms are not only our super heroes but they are also the strong force behind the operations of our school.  We are all so lucky to have you in our lives. Happy Mothers Day! 

Voting on & designing next year's festival-already!

While the Children's Day Festival was fresh in the minds of everyone, our students all participated in evaluating what they thought were the successfull parts of our recent festival activities.  Each classroom held polls to vote for the activities they would like to see in next year's festival. This was also done to practice and to re-emphasize the value of democracy and to tie back to the meaning of our recent festival. By providing a setting for our children to design and engage in decisions for their own children's day festival we hope to make it a more meaningful event.

This weekend's curriculum theme was food, so there were many exciting preparations held at each class classroom including jam making in the third class.

Next weekend is Mothers' day but will keep it a secret for now on what those activities were... shhh.....

CHILDREN'S DAY FESTIVAL

As we witnessed our community come together at this meaningful event, it was amazing to see how much everyone pitched in to make it a lovely, special day for our children and for our school. It was truly a day that reflected the spirit of our school, and the essence of the holiday which wasfilled with beautiful scenes of laughter, children wearing peace medallions written in different languages, many ages singing and dancing together.

We at the Berkeley Turkish School are touched by what a wonderful, conscientious and generous community we are forming.  As the saying goes “ It takes a village to raise a child,” well, we are very lucky to have crossed paths with all of you to be in the same village!!

We thank you for your kindness, your generosity, your endless support, and your lovely energy.  We also realize that we all volunteer and work this hard because we all believe in the importance of teaching and learning from our children the value of empathy, democracy and the richness that diversity brings to our lives.    With out your help, and appreciation, we could not have gotten this far.

We are also happy to announce that we made over 2200 dollars of sales! Most of all, we thank our lovely children who are our sparks of hope for a peaceful future.

Looking forward to celebrating many more festivals together,

On behalf of the Berkeley Turkish School,

Thank you.

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Celebrating birthdays together

At BTS we take our snack times very seriously where each family takes turns to bring each weekend's food.  This is also a time where important conversations take place where we strengthen and grow our community. We believe that food is an essential part of learning and teaching about our culture.  This weekend we also celebrated two of our student's birthdays during snack time.

A day filled with exciting activities

This weekend the Basak Altan's California College of Art Industrial Design Students visited BTS to test and get our community's feedback on the amazing educational tools they are designing as a part of their Sustainable Design Course work. The third classroom also painted with Ebru with the guidance of Meltem Hanim and the first and second groups practiced their songs for Children's Day Festival. Among the activities of the weekend, were also our science teacher Taliha Hanim’ s exciting science experiments.

Ebru painting on a rainy day

On a very rainy spring morning, Berkeley Turkish Students learned how to paint Ebru, the Turkish art of marbling.  This magical art form is done by creating designs and sprinkling color pigments on a tray of water and then transforming this pattern to paper. We thank Meltem Hanim for volunteering her time at our school and teaching our children this magical ancient art form. The beautiful work of our children will be for sale as a part of our school's fundraiser at our children's day festival.