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Tamsyn Fortune-Wood joins Heidi Steel this month, to talk about her experiences as an unschooled person.

We discuss:

· Making the decision to Home Educate her own children and ditching those school registration forms in the bin 3:00

· What are the most common questions that Tamsyn is asked when people find out that she was home educated 7:00

· A listener question is answered: What did learning look like for you, including how it changed as you grew up? 9:40

· The experience of structured work and taking exams after being autonomously educated 12:30

· Reflections on interests and life in the former years and any correlations between her life choices now 14:00

· A listener question is answered: How do you feel about the choices your parents made for you? 16:30

· Considering what life would have been like had school been part of childhood 18:00

· How we both respond to our children if/when they are curious about school 20:00

· What Tamsyn thinks she may do differently with her own children 30:00

· A listener question is answered: What are your relationships like between you and your siblings? 33:10

· How home education has influenced and formed a world view 35:00

· What parents really need to know about home education and unschooling 37:30

LIVEPLAYLEARN LINKS:

Website Liveplaylearn.org

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Summer Jean Campbell joins Heidi Steel this month, to talk about her experiences as an unschooled person

We discuss:

Introducing Summer Jean Campell and welcome to the podcast

How Summer spends her days as a grown unschooler 2:00

Reflections on how life would have been different had Summer been in school 4:00

The value of exploring your own pursuits and in your own way 8:00

Seeing the development of skills and knowledge with hindsight 10:00

How to maintain connection and magic of learning 14:00

A personal insight into family relationships past and present 22:00

Discussing extended family dynamics including managing fear and pressure from outside immediate family 27:00

Deschooling ourselves and the journey of self discovery 35:00

The worthless idea of measuring children’s learning and quantifying knowledge 44:00

Tricky subjects of trust and freedom 47:00

How to unschool 55:00

GUEST MEDIA LINKS:

Summer Jean Campbell

LIVEPLAYLEARN LINKS:

Website Liveplaylearn.org

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SUPPORT THE PODCAST ON Ko-fi:

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Alice Khamisia joins Heidi Steel this month, to talk about Creating Community

We discuss:

· How to begin finding the community that you need and the snowball effect 3:00

· The necessity of finding the right community for encouragement and support 10:00

· Dealing with discouragement, the reality of not having a ready made group given to us, and the effort required from us 12:00

· Our success stories and positive experiences of finding learning communities 13:00

· Genuine relationship building that is enriching 14:00

· Unexpected and unpredictable successes, regular connections and forging relationships 20:00

· Claiming spaces and utilising local hubs and venues 24:00

· The sub-culture that unschooling is and how to find other like-minded families 25:00

· Changing with the seasons of your child’s life and our proactive role 26:00

· Building community 30:00

· Sharing the weight of responsibility, our human need to be in a regular community, sharing time, expertise, knowledge and skills, as well as care for each other 41:00

GUEST MEDIA LINKS:

Organic Education

LIVEPLAYLEARN LINKS:

Website Liveplaylearn.org

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YouTube Live Play Learn

SUPPORT THE PODCAST ON Ko-fi:

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Rachel Evans joins Heidi Steel this month, to talk about How our Children Learn without Curriculums

We discuss:

· Snapshot of our households 3:00

· What does learning look like? 8:10

· Move from discovery to mastery learning, unconscious and conscious learning

· Web of learning and individual learning journeys 12:40

· Creating a rich and supportive environment 14:50

· Knowing our children well 15:30

· A reflective activity when it looks like our children have been only interested in one thing, forever 17:30

· How do our children learn new things without a curriculum to plan content? 18:00

· Supporting children’s learning, linear learning, and the web of learning connections 22:20

· Gaming as a gateway to learning 25:00

· How will children learn everything they need to know?

· And, the four things that drive children’s learning 32:00

· Setting the tone for life learning and loving learning beyond the age of 18 46:00

· Intrinsic motivation and removing the judgement, and fear connected with continuously grading, measuring, and evaluating creative work and instead producing it for the passion of doing it 48:00

· Foundational beliefs about how children learn organically 52:00

· Real deep learning that stays for years and leads to further skills, knowledge, and understanding 55:00

GUEST MEDIA LINKS:

Connectandrespect.co.uk

Facebook: Connect and Respect

LIVEPLAYLEARN LINKS:

Website Liveplaylearn.org

Facebook Live. Play. Learn

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Angela Harders joins Heidi Steel this month, to talk about Gentle Parenting, our journeys into unschooling, and the importance of community.

Angela is a bilingual special education teacher near Washington DC, she has been teaching for over twelve years. She is a single mum to two children, Sophia aged 7, and Benjamin aged 3.

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We discuss:

· What a typical unschooling day looks like in Angela’s household 4:00

· UK Guidelines for HE parents and the Local Authority 5:00

· Further info on responding to the LA for UK listeners 12:00

· How gentle parenting led Angela to unschooling 16:00

· How graphing quadratic equations led to Angela to question the education system.

· Realising that the decisions that we make today don’t have to be forever 22:00

· The power of observing our children.

· The joy of unschooling, sharing life together with our children, and having fun 23:20

· Angela’s top recommendations for those new to unschooling 26:20

· It’s okay to simply do more of the things that you love 30:30

· What caring for ourselves might look like 32:40

· How community support contributes to our self care especially as a single parent 35:00

· The myth of school socialisation 40:00

GUEST MEDIA LINKS:

Tales of a Toxic Teacher: Exposing the Cycles of Abuse within Our Schools

Books

Peaceful World Schoolers Podcast

RESOURCE LINKS:

John Taylor Gatto : Dumbing us down

John Holt: How Children Learn

Pam Laricchea’s Podcast: Exploring Unschooling

The local Authority and Home Education

Elective Home Education: Guidance for Parents

EHE: Departmental Guidance for Local Authorities

LIVEPLAYLEARN LINKS:

Website Liveplaylearn.org

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YouTube Live Play Learn

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Jyoti Imix joins Heidi Steel this month, to talk about recording evidence, observing children, and research on Self-Directed Education in light of the Portsmouth Judicial Review.

We discuss:

· Children’s Rights and advocating for children as a minority group 2:30

· Heidi gives a detail outline of her background 7:30

· PCC Judicial Review 12:00

· What documenting learning could look like 12:50

· Paragraph 94: “As can readily be seen, in the present case the defendant did not reject the claimant's reports because they were not in a particular form. The defendant's concerns were substantive ones. Despite the length of the claimant's reports, they were wholly assertive in nature. They contained nothing by way of actual work produced by the children. To take the example of work on To Kill a Mockingbird, which featured in submissions at the hearing, there was no material showing the degree of comprehension of the appellant's daughter concerning the novel; merely a series of statements from the claimant.” 19:00

· Adulteration and observation change the behaviour of the observed 22:00

· Involving our young people in problem solving and being part of the solution 26:00

· Research and evidence base for self directed education 28:30

· Deschooling 38:50

· Feminist Theory 44:00

· What happens when we remove structure and direction from people’s lives? 48:30

· Anarchist theory and collaboration 52:20

· Fear responses and connecting with our own selves first instead of (over) reacting 57:00

· Focusing on our children and this moment before us in this space 1:00:30

LINKS:

PCC Judicial Review

Portsmouth Judicial Review decision explained by Fiona Nicholson from edyourself

Portsmouth JR summary and read through

Summerhill After Summerhill

Ivan Illich Deschooling Society

Sugata Mitra The hole in the wall

Peter Gray Free to Learn 36:30

Gina Riley Unschooling: Exploring learning beyond the classroom 42:00

Suitable-Education website

GUEST MEDIA LINKS:

Jyotiofferings.com

LIVEPLAYLEARN LINKS:

Website Liveplaylearn.org

Facebook Live. Play. Learn

YouTube Live Play Learn

Tiersa McQueen joins Heidi Steel, in the first of a double bill, this month, to talk about Partnering Our Children

Tiersa is a parent to four unschooled children, living in Florida, and an active unschooling advocate on Twitter.

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We discuss:

· Respectfully and consciously parenting our children 1:00

· Partnering our children and over coming our inadequacy at not knowing everything 5:30

· What knowledge do we need to be able to support our children? 10:00

· The benefits of tuning into ourselves 17:30

· The importance of respecting our children’s decisions especially when they say ‘no’ 30:00

· Unschooling goals and personal goals 39:30

GUEST MEDIA LINKS:

Twitter: tiersaj

LIVEPLAYLEARN LINKS:

Website Liveplaylearn.org

Facebook Live. Play. Learn

YouTube Live Play Learn

Tiersa McQueen joins Heidi Steel, in the first of a double bill, this month, to talk about Unschooling Ourselves.

Tiersa is a parent to four unschooled children, living in Florida, and an active unschooling advocate on Twitter.

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We discuss:

· How Tiersa came to unschooling 3:40

· How our teens transition to further education 6:50

· The challenging process of changing our mindset 8:00

· How children learn when they are free from school and imposed methods 10:00

· How children naturally utilise the tools of their generation 16:00

· An epic discussion on the laziness of unschoolers and their parents 17:10

· The invalid part that our relationship with our children has to play in unschooling 24:50

· Being open to going with the flow, trusting and respecting one another 25:50

· What the young people in the McQueen family are interested in and learning about 27:00

· How unschooling ourselves has impacted our own lives as well as our families 33:00

GUEST MEDIA LINKS:

Twitter: tiersaj

LIVEPLAYLEARN LINKS:

Website Liveplaylearn.org

Facebook Live. Play. Learn

YouTube Live Play Learn

Krish Khimasia joins Heidi Steel this month, to talk about Unschooling Maths.

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Krish has been a secondary maths teacher for over twenty years, and with his wife, Alice, an unschooling parent to his four sons now aged 19, 18, 15 and 9. He now teaches at the Secret Garden, an alternative educational provision in the West Midlands.

We discuss:

· How children will learn the maths that they need for adulthood without explicitly being taught 6:45

· The essential role of play beyond the early years in building strong foundations for complex mathematical concepts 8:30

· What maths actually is, as opposed to what we have been taught that it is 9:30

· How maths is approached in unschooling families 12:20

· How and why play is vital to developing mathematical skills 15:00

· The role of board games, and other regular pastimes, in contributing to our children’s understanding of mathematics. 25:20

· Maths and computer games 32:00

· The concept of slow maths and the work of Jo Boaler 35:20

· How children make the transfer to studying for a GCSE in maths without previous tuition 37:25

· The concept of real life maths problems 42:50

· How useful really is trigonometry? 48:20

· The beauty of maths in nature 52:40

GUEST MEDIA LINKS:

You can tune on to more unschooling thoughts from Krish and Alice at Organic Education

LIVEPLAYLEARN LINKS:

Website Liveplaylearn.org

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Esther Jones from the podcast Unschool Space joins Heidi Steel this month, to talk about Unschooling Ourselves and our own Self Care.

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We discuss:

· The return to authenticity and natural living 2.10

· The importance of community 5.00

· Enabling our children to thrive6.20

· Unschooling being the best fit for our neurodivergent children 8.40

· Unschooling being the best way for children to learn about themselves 9.40

· The benefits for autistic PDA individuals 10.30

· What learning looks like, and how intrinsic motivation and discipline are innate tools 20.00

· How unschooling has impacted our lives as adults 23.36

· Trusting our children and cultivating an unschooling attitude 32.30

· Understanding our role 37.45

· The beauty and gift of parenting an autistic PDA individual 38.40

· Meeting everyone’s needs and living together 44.16

· The importance of our own self care 48.40

GUEST MEDIA LINKS:

You can listen to Esther talk with a range of guests about unschooling on Unschool Space and read her blog at A Place on a Hill

LIVEPLAYLEARN LINKS:

Website Liveplaylearn.org

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