Bisi Community Newsletter

MAY 2015 Sixty Eighth Edition

BISI COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER

GUIDING STATEMENT OF THE BRITISH INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL ISTANBUL

The British International School Istanbul provides a caring international environment, fostering cultural diversity. Individual students achieve their full academic potential, inspired to become lifelong learners and responsible citizens of the global community.

YOUR COMMUNITY! YOUR NEWS!

Message from the Pre/Primary School

From our Guiding Statements, we ‘educate students in a stimulating environment to the highest possible academic standard’ and we are dedicated to ‘strive for continuous improvement’. With this in mind, we have strengthened our Primary curriculum with the creation of a Middle Leadership Team. Our Primary Middle Leadership Team have a simi- lar role to the Heads of Department in the Secondary School. Miss Julie Esiyok oversees the History and Geography curriculum for the Primary School. She worked exceptionally hard to arrange a stimulating History Week this month. The children enjoyed participating in more focused History activities in this specialist week. They experienced different rooms in the Primary building displaying distinctive periods of global history. The children relished their lunch as they had to eat without any knives and forks for the day! A huge thank you goes to Miss Esiyok, all the teachers for organising their rooms so innovatively, and to all the parents who assisted the teachers in gathering artefacts for the week.

We challenged our gifted athletes this month with their trip to Athens for the COBIS Games. They competed against 12 other British/ International schools from around the world in the disciplines of football, basketball and swimming. Many of our children achieved a personal best. A huge thank you goes to our sponsors and the teachers who accompanied the children to this important event in our sporting calendar. Congratulations to the teams; your commitment and dedication paid off!

For our younger children, the EYFS Sports Day was so much fun this year! The event opened with an impressive gymnastic display from some of our talented Primary students. The sports events began and the children loved participating in the water race, the bicycle race, the obstacle course, and ball games with the parachute. The children, teachers and parents then relaxed in the Botanic Gardens and appreciated the barbeque arranged for them. Thank you to the PE department, especially Miss Yana for assembling the day, and Miss Ozlem and her staff for arranging the barbeque.

As our Guiding Statements also encourage, we ‘educate students to be respectful of, and knowledgeable about, and be involved in their local and international communities’. We thank our community for giving so generously to the Nepal earthquake appeal. We are also grateful to all our families for supporting our Fun Day Fridays so well this month. We collect items on the four Fridays preceding Fun Day in exchange for the children to wear their own clothes and come to school in a funny costume. Tickets for adults are 10TL and children have free entry. All profits raised will go to our three chosen charities. We hope to see you there on Saturday 6 June from 11:00- 15:00 at our Zekeriyakoy campus!

The City Year 3 children had a wonderful time in Iznik this month on their residential trip. They thoroughly enjoyed all the activities on offer. Many thanks to the Year 3 teachers for preparing such a creative itinerary for these children to experience.

The month was rounded off by a magnificent Talent Show arranged by Mademoiselle Lapointe and Miss Heather, our Student Council Support Teachers. They chose ten acts for the children to enjoy. The acts varied from traditional bal- let dancing to modern dance, from traditional piano to rap music, and even an archery show! Well done to all our brilliant participants; you thoroughly entertained us!

Finally, we would like to say congratulations to our graduates this year. Several of these students started our school in Pre School and we are delighted to see them complete their studies at BISI and move successfully forward onto the next chapter in their life.

We hope you enjoy this month’s Newsletter.

Amanda Ilhan Richard I’Anson Pre and Primary School Deputy Director Pre and Primary School Director

Alkent — Year 1

Dear Greenpeace

Year 1 children at Alkent have been learning all about writing letters using the wonderful children’s book ‘Dear Greenpeace…’. In the book, Emily finds a whale in her pond and writes to Greenpeace to ask their advice. The Alkent Year 1s have also been finding weird and wonderful animals in their homes – including crocodiles in the washing machine and tigers in their bedrooms! The children have written several imaginative letters as part of their Eng- lish work. They have also written to Greenpeace themselves as the children finished their Literacy unit by holding a cake sale to raise money for Greenpeace and the positive work they do in protecting our planet.

Teachers at Alkent have been very impressed with the children’s letter writing skills. They are writing superstars!

Miss Alix Peacock and Miss Molly Hill Year 1 Class Teachers

The Year 1s baked and sold cakes to raise money to send to Greenpeace

Super Letter writing from

Etiler—EYFS

EYFS Sports Day - May 15th 2015

Another fabulous EYFS sports day event. It was great to see all the teams in their colours and patterns, and parents joining in with their children’s class teams too. We all enjoyed watching the gymnastics show before Miss Yana got us all energized with the warm ups. Then off we went around the track joining in water relays to parachute fun and a scooter race too. Thanks to the Year 6 students who helped at each station, you were great role models for the EYFS children. Mr Mahon did a fantastic job as our DJ controlling the music and pass- ing on instructions for all. We ended of the events with the children cheering on the adults for the Parents Race. Then Mr Richard and Miss Amanda presented all the children with a medal for participa- tion. A well done to all the EYFS children. We celebrated further with a delicious BBQ pic- nic lunch in the botanical gardens. A great day had by everyone!

Miss Tamarisk EYFS Co-Ordinator.

Etiler — Year 3

Etiler — Year 5

Year 5A making a model of our Solar System

The students in 5A made a simple model of the Solar System in the garden at Etiler. The idea was to put the planets (tennis balls, basketball, dodgeball, ping pong ball, etc) a roughly 'proportionate to real life' distance away from the Sun (the beach ball). The children took a table of distances of the planets from the Sun, in kil- ometers, and considered how to come up with proportionate distances which would fit into our garden - we didn't have 4,504,000,000km (distance to Neptune) to work with!

James Appleby

Etiler—BISI Got Talent!

BIS really has got talent!

We had a fun filled afternoon watching magicians, rhythmic gymnasts, flute and piano soloists and duets. There was Aikido, mime, singing, a song and dance duo and LOTS of cardsharps! Thank you everyone who auditioned or participated.

Etiler Campus

Zekeriyakoy—BISI Got Talent!

Primary—History Week

History Week in Alkent

In Alkent, we all had a great time during History Week investigating several different artefacts. We enjoyed asking lots of questions about each object and finding out all about them. Everyday we did interesting Literacy work based on the objects.

Then on one afternoon, we were all mixed up into groups and enjoyed a range of activities. We learnt about European Castles, Aus- tralian Aboriginal Art and dinosaur fossil finding.

At the end of the week we showed all of our friends the excellent work we have been doing.

We love History and being Historians!

Alison Guzel

History Week in Etiler

Living History Day in Etiler Campus was very lively with reconstructions of the Conquering of Con- stantinople, building bridges to Macchi Picchu, Building the Rumeli Fort, counting Inca style, Printing Want- ed posters with reusable Gutenberg letters and catching and trying to get cured of the Bubonic Plague. A lot of fun was had by all and we hope the children learnt a lot too!

Carolyn Guven

Printed on Gutenbergs Press

Making roads and bridges to macchu Picchu

Building the Rumeli Fort

Conquering Constantinople

Catching the Plague Counting on an Inca quipa

History Week in Zekeriyakoy

Living History Day It was a very exciting day on all campuses as the children travelled back in time, and around the world, to find out what different parts of the world were like during the time period 1350CE -1500CE.

Zekeriyakoy Year 1, 2 and 3 Children travelled from Korea to India, England, Australia, China and Africa! In Korea they learnt about the introduction of simpler Korean characters to help everyone in Korea to be able to read and write. They met the very rich king of Calicut in India and the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama and his crew, finding out about the spices, which were so expensive they were called ‘white gold’. In England, they caught the plague and met the plague doctor finding out which of his weird and unusual ‘cures’ might have actually worked! They learnt how drumming was used to communicate in Africa and they played drums themselves. They learnt about Ming china, where it was exported to and why it was so important to the Chinese econo- my. In Australia, children were surprised to learn that the Aboriginal people had no written language and that their culture was passed down through stories, drawings and dances. They also had the chance to prac- tise special family dances together.

Zekeriyakoy for Year 4, 5 and 6 Peru, England, Italy, Africa, North America and Europe were part of the explorations undertaken by the old- er children! In Peru, they discovered many interesting facts about the Incas and they made their own quipu - a system of coloured knots and strings used for counting and recording. Meeting some of the Ojibwe aboriginal tribe in their tepee and experiencing firsthand the difficulties the first explorers had in communicating and trading with them was all part of the fun in North America! They enjoyed using scale models of medie- val weapons such as catapults and trebuchet whilst visiting England. In Italy, they soon discovered what an incredibly talented man Leonardo da Vinci was as they matched his drawings of inventions to their modern day incarnations; learnt about his bridge designs; and participated in a collective painting of his fa- mous Lady with an Ermine. In Africa, they learnt how some European explorers of the 15th century, kid- napped local African people and took them away to use them as slaves on spice and sugar plantations. Final- ly, they all had a chance to discover how the sport of fencing originated from sword fighting practices and they had a go at fencing themselves!

This year both COBIS squads were hosted by St. Catherine's British School in Athens. The Primary and Secondary teams flew out on May 13th for an action- filled 3 days of intense sporting activity. We competed in football, athletics and swimming and both squads were absolutely amazing! Our Primary team got personal best results in every individual event they participated in and our Secondary swimmers made 7 swim finals!

In football, our primary girls finished 4th overall. This is our best COBIS football result to date!! Taking individual medals were Jil Desai for her 800m and Aina Azri for her Javelin.

What a tremendous achievement for both girls. Thank you to all who supported the event for their efforts and contributions. We look forward to next year's event in the UK...

Miss Bell, Miss Scotland, Mr Leaver, Mr McLellan, Mr Tough & Mr Boardman

The Primary Team

The Secondary Team

Message from the Secondary School

The Graduation Ceremony of the Class of 2015 took place on Friday 29 May at 2:00pm in the Zekeriyakoy Campus. The event was a great success and, for once, even the weather was kind to us. It was a great pleas- ure to see so many people there, and especially to see the large number of past students who returned for the event.

Every year we have some of our students performing at the ceremony and this year was no different. The Processional, “Aimez Quand On Vous Aime" by Francesco Paolo Tosti was beautifully sung by the Cham- ber Choir consisting of students fromYear 7, 8 and 9. The choir were accompanied by Dr Dominic Sargent and conducted by Ms Lisa Meyer. The first musical interlude was the performance of "Don't Stop Believ- ing" by Journey performed by the Year 10 Musicians. The second musical interlude was a stunning performance by Sheida Kiran singing "O Mio Babino Caro" from "Gianni Schicchi" by Giacomo Puccini. The recessional music, "Our Time" from "Merrily We Roll Along" by Stephen Sondheim’was performed by the Chamber Choir with Ji Won Min and Sheida Kiran. It is not easy to perform at such an important occasion and in front of so many spectators, but our students really were a great credit to their teachers. Their perfor- mances were backed up by a great deal of work throughout the term and they have very good reason to feel proud of themselves.

Our guest speaker this year was Marco Iannacone, Chief Financial Officer of Yapi Credi Bank, Member of the Board of Governors and father of twins in the Primary School. Mr Iannacone gave our Graduating Class some excellent advice and I hope that they listened very carefully to him.

Our Valedictorians this year were Chiara Vivaldi and Mina Dolay.

I would like to thank, Helen Kiran, Seef Marsden, Richard Robinson, Dominic Sargent, Lisa Mayer, Marco Iannacone, Ozlem Ozturk and her staff, Sheida Kiran, The Year 10 Musicians, The BISI Chamber Choir, Chiara Vivaldi and Mina Dolay and all the Class of 2015 and their families and friends for coming together and making this year’s Graduation Ceremony such a wonderful success.

William

Class of 2015

Hannah Watson is planning Ada Idil is going to study Psychology Arda Oguz is hoping to Medical Pinar Oguz is going to to go to read History at at Leiden University. Sciences at Sidney University. study International Cambridge. Business in Australia.

Alp Ekinci is hoping to go to Queen Fuad Karimli is hoping to Luisa Schnapperelle is hoping Julide Yanikomeroglu is hoping Mary University to study Business. study Business at Cass Busi- to study Psychology at the to go to Reading University to ness School, City University. University of Glasgow. study Business.

Sara Sabzikari is going to Soroush Sabzikari is hoping Claire McCormack is hoping to Giorgi Arveladze is hoping to study study Biological Sciences at to go to Edinburgh University study English Literature at Glasgow Psychology at the University of the University of East Anglia. to study Chemistry. University. Exeter.

Mina Dolay is going to Northeastern in Caroline Findikliev is going for her Piotr Laniewski is hoping Mingyu Park is hoping to the USA to study Chemical Engineering. Bachelor of Arts at the University to study Psychology at study Mathematics at of British Columbia. Reading. Edinburgh University.

Chiara Vivaldi is planning Anne Blanken is deciding between Vasudev Bahadouria is Kaan Gokceli is hoping to stay to go to University College Environment and Development at LSE going to study Mechanical in Turkey to study History at London to study Arts and and Arts and Sciences at University Engineering at Penn State Fatih University. Sciences. College London. University USA.

Ramon Klomp is going to Sinan Atay is planning to Delft University to study study Business in Texas. Architecture. Congratulations to the Class of 2015

Zekeriyakoy—Year 7 Trip to Elgiz Museum of Modern Art

Recently the Year 7s visited the Elgiz Museum of Modern Art in Maslak with a whole range of classroom instruments to find inspiration for improvisation/composition from the pieces of art at the museum. In class groups, they chose one piece of art that they liked and that they wanted to create music for. Once they had worked out how they were going to create the sounds they wanted, they performed their pieces to the other two classes, who had to try and work out which piece of art the music was for, just by listening!

As a follow on from this trip, the Year 7s also performed their pieces to the Year 8s in the theatre. As part of the same performance, we invited internationally renowned coloratura soprano, Joanna Mongiardo (who is also a parent) to come in to school and give a short recital/workshop of some Italian and French operatic ari- as, linked with the Year 8 Arts group studying the Baroque period in Music. Her wonderful singing, exper- tise and lovely manner with the students inspired many of them to ask searching and unusual questions, as this was, for many of them, their first introduction to opera.

Here is a selection of a few comments from the students' reflections:

'Opera is a way to express feelings.. wonderful! She was so good and she could go so high.' (Erin 8I) 'I learned how you can sing opera in other languages and how opera singers use their bodies to sing.' (Can 8I) 'It is a whole new level of music introduced to us. Her pronunciation was perfect.' (Berke 8I) 'I enjoyed the piano. I liked Joanna's trill!' (Rishibh 8I) 'I really enjoyed the fact that she came to this school and showed us her talent for singing.' (Aral 8B) 'I enjoyed her high and soft voice. (Jinho 8B) 'I enjoyed the way she acted on stage, how she would always explain the song.' (Nicole 7B) 'I liked listening to her when she was speaking.' (Giulia 7B) 'I enjoyed the trill, the high E and the fastness.' (Jannis 7B) 'It was awesome. It was my first listening to opera." (Naoki 7I) 'Listening to live opera.' (Selin 7I) 'It was so cool!' (Inkyo 7I) 'I enjoyed the ensemble with the piano, the quality of the voice.' (Alara 7S) 'I personally thought that she was a really talented lady.' (Hanin 7S) 'I enjoyed how nicely she answered all our questions. She knew many things and I enjoyed listening to her stories.' (Amalia 7S) 'I enjoyed her talent, determination and singing. (Morgan 7S)

As you can see from the students' comments, having Joanna come and sing to us was a really wonderful and inspiring experience for all of us! Thank you!

Lisa Mayer (Year 7 and 8 Music teacher)

Zekeriyakoy– Year 10 & 12

Business students receive a masterclass on working in the hospitality industry and managing the Bomonti Hilton Hotel

Year 10 and 12 Business students were fortunate enough to be invited to the Bomonti Hilton Hotel; one of Istanbul’s newest and luxurious hotels, to attend a careers day. The Bomonti Hilton has only been open for one year and is one of the largest hotels within the centre of Istanbul with a 800 bedroom capacity plus the biggest ballroom to cater for functions.

The students were given a masterclass in hospitality by Carolina Berker who is the hotel’s Training Needs Manager and a former BISI student who graduated from the IB programme in 2010. Carolina took very special care of the students and demonstrated how hospitality should be provided.

The students attended a career fair which outlined the range of jobs available in the hotel. The students were able to meet with a range of Hilton’s employees and participate in a range of activities designed to provided further insight into the different job roles. In addition, Carolina provided a guided tour of the hotel including the Presidential 500m2 suite, which left students in awe. After a delicious lunch the students were taken to the conference boardroom and received a presentation from Mr Remco Norden, the Hilton’s General Manager. The day ended with a Q&A session whereby Mr Norden answered the students many questions with honesty and detail.

Feedback from the students after the day illuminated that the hotel visit had been incredibly worthwhile:

Martina Clemente (Year 10) “It was a unique experience and I dont think that I will be able to have another business experience like this in my life ever.” Selin Dolay (Year 10) “This was such an amazing experience that will really help me further on with Business.” Mariam (Year 10) “It was a great experience. I was so priviledged to see how hotels work in depth. I don’t regret takng Business.” Tolga Ekinci (Year 10) “It was a great experience – I didnt realise how important location was to a business.” Batuhan Kuluc (Year 10) “I really enjoyed seeing a hotel in the opposite way you would usually – now I understand just how much goes into running and managing a hotel.” Pietro Latini (Year 12) “Seeing such a big hotel in the city shows me development of the Hilton brand. The fact that it has over 800 rooms impresses me even further – a great achievement.” Manha Ha (Year 12) “I can now appreciate that there are many different departments required to run a hotel. The hotel elevator was awesome!”

Ruth McLellan

Bomonti Hilton Training Needs. Carolına Berker Hilton Whole Group, including (former BISI student) with Mr Remco Norden - Bomontı hotel's awards Hılton General Manager and Carolına Berker - Bomontı Hılton Traınıng Needs Manager

Hilton presidential suite - Year 10 and Year 12 Busıness students in the Marıam Zara learnıng about livıig area. beıng a securıty guard

The Nepal Earthquake

On the 7th of May 2015, BISI had a Mufti day initiated by a student in school to help raise money for those in need. The students had the opportunity to bring 5 TL or more. Overall, as an international community, we have raised 14,608 TL for the people who were badly affected by the earthquake that recently took place in Nepal. In total, we have transferred 3552.45 GBP to The British International School Katmandu.

The money was spent on three different purposes:  The rebuilding of local schools  The Disabled New Life Centre  To hearing and sight impaired children

Good job to everyone who participated in raising this amount to help Nepal.

Sarika 9S

DIRECTORS OF SCHOOLS

Amanda Ilhan Pre School & Primary School Deputy Director +90 212 202 7027 [email protected]

Richard I’Anson Pre School & Primary School Director +90 212 257 5136 [email protected]

William Bradley Director of Secondary and Principal of +090 212 202 7027 Zekeriyakoy Campus [email protected]

Tuba Guven Director of Admissions +90 212 286 7375 [email protected]

Helen Kiran Head of PR/Communications +90 212 202 7027 [email protected]

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