Show Notes
Welcome back to another episode of the BIG Home Ed Conversations Podcast. Kelly and Ashley are continuing Season 5’s “topic from a hat” home education challenge — where they pick a theme, explore it with their kids for the week (without telling each other what they’re doing), then come back to compare notes, resources, and real-life learning.
This week’s topic: Food Around the World — and it takes them way beyond “trying new recipes”, into geography, history, climate, farming, food miles, hunger relief, and how food choices impact communities and the planet.
Season 5 Sponsor: Strew (and the feature we’re loving this week)
This season is sponsored by Strew — a home education logging app developed by a UK home educating mum and her brother. They’ve given us access to the app and we’re using it to track what we’re doing and share what we’re enjoying as we go. This week, Ashley has been focusing on the book tracking function:
You can scan a book and log it as an activity (great for read-alouds and independent reading)
Ashley created a “dummy child” called Library to track her home education book collection
She tags books with keywords (country, geography, history, etc.) so she can quickly see what she already owns
It helps prevent over-buying or borrowing loads from the library when you don’t need to
Kelly’s also using Strew to support a reading challenge with her kids and to look back over time at:
What they’ve read
How their reading level and text complexity is developing
You can download Strew on iOS and Android. https://strew.app/r/bighomeed Use code bighomeed when you subscribe (so it links back to where you found it).
In this episode, we chat about:
Why “Food Around the World” can go in a million directions (and why that’s the magic of it)
Food, travel, culture, and how communities grow/produce food differently
How climate, geography, and environment shape what people eat
How food connects to history (including Roman influences in Britain)
Why this topic can be tricky with neurodivergent / selective eaters — but still totally doable
Food miles, carbon impact, and the surprising footprint of an everyday breakfast
Soil health, farming, and how modern agriculture affects nutrients, rivers, and habitats
Hunger relief, food banks, and how food distribution works behind the scenes
Local economy: where your food money goes (and why local matters)
Listen to find out next weeks topic!
Follow + connect
Instagram + TikTok: @bighomeedpodcast Website + weekly blog/resources: bighomeedpodcast.com If you’re joining in with our weekly topic challenge, come and tell us what you did — we’d love to hear your ideas and share them with the community.
More from The BIG Home Ed Conversations
Whether you came to home ed after your child burnt out of school, or you're the parent running on empty right now, burnout is something so many of us know far too well. In this Season 6 episode of our series on the tricky bits of home education, Kelly and Ashley get honest about home ed burnout: what parent burnout actually looks like, why it creeps up on us, and how to find our way back, for our kids and for ourselves.
Consistency is one of those words that can make home educating parents feel a bit twitchy. Some weeks your home ed routine flows beautifully, and some weeks the maths book hasn't been opened and someone's still in their pyjamas at 2pm. In this Season 6 episode on the tricky bits of home ed, Kelly and Ashley unpick what consistency really means in home education. Do you need a strict homeschool schedule, or is a gentler rhythm (showing up, keeping the curiosity going and coming back to things after a break) enough?
Welcome to season six of The BIG Home Ed Conversations Podcast, where we're digging into the tricky bits of home education. Not the sunshine-and-nature-walks highlight reel, but the real, unglamorous moments that every home educating family knows too well.
In this final episode of the season, we’re doing something a bit different. (Please note, no explicit details are mentioned, but use caution if you listen with children as we do discuss things they may be exposed to as they start to use the internet more widely.) We originally planned an episode focused on internet safety and online security… and then real life happened. We were away at our annual home ed camp, the world took over, and we decided to lean into the learning that was already happening right in front of us. So this becomes a wider conversation about:
In this bonus episode of The BIG Home Ed Conversations, Kelly Rigg is joined by Dr. Chris Bagley — educational psychologist, musician, author, and co-founder of States of Mind (with B. Herbert).