Welcome to the Play Academy podcast. Each episode will invite you to consider a topic essential to a great homeschool: to boost your skills and confidence, reflect on your family, and help you give your children exactly the kind of childhood and education you want them to have.
In this first introduction, meet Cathy and hear about how the Play Academy can support you and your children.
To get full access to the Play Academy including all our Five Day Homeschool Units, monthly Masterclasses, and our exclusive community group, join here.
Click the play arrow below to listen to this episode.
(There’s a transcript below for anyone who needs it).
Podcast transcript : Episode One – Welcome to the Play Academy
Intro music
A very warm welcome to The Play Academy. I’m Cathy James and I am delighted to welcome you here to our learning community.
The Play Academy welcomes all families.
We have members from all continents around the globe apart from Antarctica.
We have homeschooling families – in the UK we tend to say home educating, in the US I know you tend to say homeschooling, and you’ll hear me flip between the two phrases, just to include everyone. We also have families who use our resources alongside traditional school, and education professionals as well in our community. We include LGBTQ+ families, families with disabilities and illness, and neurodiverse parents and children. Everyone will find a home here.
Our resources are secular, so they can sit alongside your family’s own faith practice, and work for families with no faith or perhaps families with a mixture of faith backgrounds. Our resources are multicultural, including units on Ramadan, the Nativity, Hanukkah, Chinese New Year, and Diwali, and many more so they will introduce your children to a range of religions and festivals from around the globe, encouraging our kids to appreciate global diversity and to be inclusive.
The Play Academy will make your teaching so much easier. I hope it feels like a big, relaxing outbreath to join us here and know your home-school is all sorted.
Our units are all planned for you, and yet a full of flexibility. We organise each unit into a five day kit – but you don’t have to use them Monday to Friday if that doesn’t suit you. You can fit them into your routine. Some people do do one a week, some people spread them over two weeks so they can do days out in between, some people dip in and out through the year, and when your children absolutely fall in love with one of our topics – and I know someone has done this recently with our Fairies Unit – you can take your time and really go deep with the learning and the experience, until your children are ready to move on to something different.
I will be guiding you through the year, highlighting one unit each week, and you can go ahead and follow my programme if that’s what you want to, so all your timetabling is just done for you and you don’t really have to think about it again but there’s never any pressure to do everything.
We have units that fit perfectly with the seasons of the year, such as our apples unit for the autumn and our daffodils unit for the spring. These units will help your children connect to nature and find their place in the cycle of the year.
But you might like to also choose your own units, and you can totally do that. You can start with any unit and do them in any order. The Play Academy really is created to suit YOUR family needs.
So we also have a lot of ‘timeless’ units that would fit in at any time of the year such as our Space, Circles, Fairies, Dinosaurs so you can use them whenever you choose to.
Each unit is very carefully planned to be suitable for all children. That means – absolute magic! – all your children can do this together. There is SO much benefit in children of mixed ages learning together – both for the older ones and the younger ones. And it means you won’t get run ragged trying to run three lessons at once, logging someone on to the computer while teaching math and setting up play dough. With The Play Academy, everyone comes together, for one activity a day. I have really found this to be so beneficial to family life, that’s really built connections between my kids and given us life-long family memories, so I really hope The Play Academy does the same for you.
Rather than teach though un-natural separate school subjects, The Play Academy is based around themes that integrate skills. So you’ll find math, literacy, language, science, world culture, art, nature study, fine motor skills, imagination, and play are all integrated in the units and work together to give your children the best possible education. That’s one that is engaging, it reflects how we learn in the real world, and lets your kids make strong links across subjects and of course all the units are full of hands-on activities and lots of fun.
Each unit has full instructions for you. They come with printables within the unit, so there’s no need to go searching for them. Once you choose which unit you want to do, and download it, you’ll find everything there that you need. This makes your teaching a lot easier and it guides you through step-by-step. So you’ll know what materials you need to gather, how to introduce the unit and how to lead each activity within it. So that’s going to free up your time, and brain-space and energy, so you can focus on what really matters which is building those connections with your kids and supporting the through their learning.
You can decide if you want to print off the unit or you might like to use it on screen, that’s up to you. It’s all ad-free, including the on-screen version so that’s great when you’re sharing it with your kids. You don’t need to worry about what they might see on there.
So, now that your homeschool programme is all planned for you, you get some time for yourself! And included in your Play Academy membership is a series of masterclasses just for you. I always think, if we were in school we’d have the benefit of professional development lessons, but we deserve this in a home education setting too. And in fact we can mentor our own children by showing them our own life-long learning.
So each month we’ll take a topic as the theme of our masterclass – there’ll be things like how to create the best sensory environment for our children, how to help our children develop a growth mindset rather than a closed mindset, or perhaps how do you even know if your children are learning enough. These masterclasses will be an opportunity for us just to pause each month and reflect on how our children are doing. They’re going to develop our skills and our own confidence, and they’ll help us really focus in on what our intentions are for our home education and lead the kind of education environment for our child that we truly want for them.
You’ll also find a welcoming community in the Play Academy. We have our own group, which is a lot like a Facebook group except it’s totally private, there’s no ads on there and just for us. So this is a place to come and ask questions, to share your wins and celebrate your children, and make friends with other families who are working to give their children the kind of childhood that you believe in.
Our monthly masterclasses will be announced in that community, and we also hold a Friday Show & Tell thread in there, where you can you share what your children have been up to each week. We can kind of use it as our ‘staff room’ or ‘teachers’ lounge’ where we can gather and chat and get to know each other.
So please do come and join us in the community. I pop in there most days, so if I can help you with anything just ask. You can use the link the notes to head straight through there, to the community – and you’ll also find a link on the main homepage of our site, So I hope will really enjoy the resources in the Play Academy. I hope you’ll find the Units make your homeschool so much easier. And I hope you’ll come and say hi to us and get to know us in the Play Academy community.
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To get full access to the Play Academy including all our Five Day Homeschool Units, monthly Masterclasses, and our exclusive community group, join here.
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