Home education humanities: history, geography and RE

Humanities are the easiest subjects to home educate and the ones most often done badly, because they are so easy to cover in disconnected fragments. Six months on the Egyptians, then the Tudors, then the Romans, leaves a child who knows three things and has no idea how they relate.

Chronology first, detail second

The single most useful thing in history at home is a timeline on a wall. Not a project, just a long strip of paper that everything gets added to as you meet it. It costs nothing and it does the job that a school curriculum spends nine years trying to do. Once a child has a rough shape of what came before what, individual topics attach to something. Without it, every topic floats.

Primary sources earlier than you think

Children handle real sources well, often better than textbook summaries, because a real document has texture and confusion in it. A census return, a photograph, a will, a piece of propaganda, a letter. Ask who made this, when, for whom, and what they wanted the reader to think. That is the whole discipline of history in four questions, and it transfers straight into how a teenager reads the news.

Geography is two subjects

• Physical: rivers, mountains, weather, climate, rocks, coasts, tectonics. This is science-shaped and benefits from being outside.
• Human: where people live and why, cities, trade, migration, resources, development, borders.
• Both need map work, and map work is a genuine skill: grid references, contours, scale, direction. It is also one of the few things a family walk teaches better than a book.

Local history, and belief

Local history is the best value in the subject. The nearest old building, the street names, the graveyard, the census records for your own address, the local museum. It is free, it is concrete, and it makes the abstract national story attach to somewhere a child actually knows.

Religious education at home covers two different things: what people believe and practise, which is knowledge, and what your family holds to be true, which is yours. Both are legitimate and confusing them is what makes the subject awkward. A child who understands what a mosque is for, what happens at a Passover meal, what a Buddhist means by attachment, and what your own family believes, is better educated than one who has only been given one of those.

How Different Drums helps here

This is where the worldview settings do real work. You set your family’s faith position, philosophy or secular approach per child, and it carries across subjects, so history and RE come out framed the way your family actually thinks rather than the way ours does. A Biblical Christian family, a Cultural or Traditional family, a Science-Focused family and a Freethinking family get genuinely different material on the same topic. Curricula can be built on almost any humanities topic with week-by-week checkpoints, which is a useful way to give a scattered subject a spine. Worksheets and tests are printable with answers, and the tutor will discuss a source with a child rather than summarising it for them. Humanities content is AI-generated rather than drawn from the hand-verified bank, which covers arithmetic, maths, calculus, chemistry and physics. On mainstream historical and geographical material that is reliable, but on very niche topics, obscure local history or minor figures, AI gets less reliable and specific dates and names are worth checking.