Town Planning & Street Furniture (Home Education UK Topic Challenge)
In this episode of The BIG Home Ed Conversations Podcast, Kelly and Ashley continue their weekly home education UK “topic challenge” — choosing a theme and exploring it with their children through real-life learning, conversation, and curiosity-led activities.
This week’s topic: Town planning and street furniture — and it turns into a brilliant mix of project-based learning, local community awareness, and practical thinking about how towns work (and who decides what gets built).
Whether you’re home educating, (homeschooling for our US friends), this episode is packed with ideas you can adapt for your own family.
What we cover in this episode:
Town planning basics: how towns evolve, what problems they’re trying to solve, and why infrastructure matters.
Street furniture in everyday life: benches, lamp posts, traffic lights, junctions, road layouts — and the “why” behind them!
A fun “run the town” council game (decision-making, teamwork, budgeting, environment, and community trust.)
Learning through videos and visuals: what’s underneath major cities (including hidden infrastructure) how cities change over time (including a London evolution-style video) how heating, water, and energy systems can work at city scale.
Real-life community learning moments: conversations sparked by local elections and meeting a local candidate talking about leadership, values, and why voting matters (and why kids can’t vote yet!)
Hands-on play: building a town at home using toys (roads, emergency services, zoo, trains, role play and storytelling)
So whether your home education journey is eclectic, unschooling, project led or otherwise - you can draw some great ideas from this episode and as usual - we would love to hear yours too!
Share with us on Instagram or TikTok - @bighomeedpodcast or visit our new website - www.bighomeedpodcast.com
This season is sponsored by Strew, a home education logging app created by a UK home educating mum and her brother. To try Strew, head to www.strew.app or Search “Strew Home Ed app” on your apple or android phone and use code: bighomeedpodcast