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.