Golestan Education

At Golestan, we value nature, kindness, creativity, diligence, curiosity, and responsibility.

With the encouragement of altruism and empathy, we strive to foster a community of confident, caring, and compassionate children that value Iranian culture while being responsible and inspiring citizens of our ever-changing, multi-cultural world.

Golestan applies a heuristic approach to teaching and a holistic approach to living.  From the rich lesson plans, to the wholesome foods the children eat, every detail has been thought out and is practiced with the utmost authenticity.

We have expanded to a new campus at the Berkeley/Kensington/El Cerrito border, and are in the planning phases for removing asphalt to build a new 1.5 acre farm which will source our kitchen and feed our farm animals.  

Golestan is an International Baccalaureate Candidate Preschool, elementary, after school and a summer camp program. Through our Colab, Golestan provides probono support and collaboration with schools all over the world.

In 2016, Golestan was the first (and only) preschool to be selected as an Ashoka Changemaker school.

Our Approach to Food

Our kitchen is the heart of our school.

At Golestan we nurture our children with love, kindness and also good food! We only serve whole foods – all meals and snacks are prepared in-house by our chef. We even bake our own crackers and bread.  All our ingredients are fresh, organic and to the extent possible, local. All our meat is grass fed and pastured/free range, delivered directly from Marin Sun Farms. Fruits and vegetables are seasonal/local – some come from our garden (lettuce, herbs, kale, cucumbers…) and others from the Berkeley Farmer’s Market or Monterey Market.

We only serve full fat organic dairy products, our yogurt comes from Strauss Family Creamery.

    snack time at Golestan

At Golestan, we promote healthy and conscientious habits from an early age; this includes eating habits. We continually expose them to different ingredients and flavors so that they may develop a palette that is open to a variety of tastes. The children sit around the table with their teachers and enjoy family–style meals.

One thing our chefs have always enjoyed is that we teach the children about a new country every Friday – on those days, our chef creates a full meal that represents the food from that country.  We are the proud owners of a Charlie Cart which gets used a lot because our preschools also cook foods from the country they're studying every Friday.  We hope to finalize the plans for our fully equipped teaching kitchen in 2019-2020.