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Anyone use My Father's World or Beautiful Feet?
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Hello all,
I was just wondering if anyone had used MFW or BF ? And if so how they liked it and if they felt it was Charlotte Mason style. Would love any and all feed back. Thanks so much!
Love BF! Great living books and there is a guide to go with it! However, it is only history and geography. HTH
I used BF for early American History…I tweaked it a lot but I really got a lot of good ideas from their (inexpensive) guide. MFW will include a lot more subjects and have a more detailed guide. It depends on what you are looking for.
I have used both. From MFW we used Adventures, ECC, and most of the rest of the 5 year cycle. From BF we have used the American and World high school set, and the History of Science set but honestly we mostly just read the books and narrated so I can’t speak much to the actual assignments in the course books from BF.
MFW is more CM friendly at the younger/earlier levels, becoming much less so the farther up in the cycle you go. It is never pure CM even in the early levels, but that may be fine with you… it might depend on what you are looking for. A lot of people really like the blend of classical and CM. For me the classical influence became too much, especially as we got towards the middle and end of the cycle. My kids were really losing their love of learning and when it got to the point where we were all dreading school, I decided something had to change. However, like I said, a lot of people really like it.
Just to clarify, I know some people would contend that CM *is* classical, but here I am differentiating between CM and SWB-style classical.
Another thing I really didn’t like about MFW is their tendency to make heavy use of textbooks and workbooks for some subjects/topics. I personally feel that the more I learn about CM’s methods, the more I look back and see that MFW is really not very CM. I think publishers have a tendency to claim their program is “CM” if they throw in some living books to augment the study and perhaps add an occasional narration. Hope I’m not stepping on anyone’s toes by saying that. But anyway, in MFW there are some CM influences, for instance they encourage you to read living books (though in many cases these are not integral to the course and I came to feel that I wanted the living books to BE the course). Also they do a form of dictation, though they use a textbook for the bulk of the spelling; and they do some narration. Also they use the Serl books for English in the younger grades which is good.
Don’t know if that helps at all… feel free to ask more questions! 🙂
~Jenn
Hi! There are links in this thread to others with the same questions you are asking.
http://simplycharlottemason.com/scmforum/topic/cm-or-my-fathers-world-i-need-to-decide#post-62433
The thread that Sheraz posted is so helpful; I hope you get a chance to check it out, mommybyhisgrace.
One thing that might be good to mention here is that the way reading is taught in the K’er and 1st grade years is not CM. I don’t know if that is important to you or not… but someone on that thread (the OP I think) mentioned that those two levels are CM-based so I wanted to say that, while there are some aspects of those levels that are somewhat reminiscent of CM’s methodology, the method of reading instruction is decidedly not.
You know, I feel like it kind of sounds as though I think MFW is really badly done…. I don’t think that. I just know that I started using it early on in our home schooling journey because I thought it was CM, but found out the hard way (and the expensive way) that it really isn’t. I would love to save you that mistake if it is a CM curriculum you’re looking for.
HTH 🙂
You can take anyone’s selection of living books and make it more CM or less CM. I have used MFW in the past but stopped using it because I didn’t like their choice of books as they advanced to the high school level. I still use BF books, in fact many of them are scheduled in SCM History modules. Have you tried the SCM History modules? If you are looking for CM style this is the closest thing out there to doing it CM.
We have started with Beautiful Feet and love it so far!! I feel like they are very CM and are very cost effective if you just get the guide and check out the books out of the library. I read through the guide that we have pretty extensively so far and believe it to be very accurate, I appreciated that the early american starts with Leif Eriksson as opposed to Columbus, which is awesome. I am looking forward to it, we also got the character guide for supplementary on to our character building. So far am very pleased with the content.
We’ve enjoyed BF Early American History (elementary) several times now – the books are still favorites. We tried BF Ancients for one of our boys for a high-school level course and found it not to be CM friendly at all. While it uses many living books, its spine was a very dry textbook and the reading load was pretty high on a daily basis. We chose something else after a few weeks.
We also used one level of MFW (Ex-1850) and while we liked some of the books, it truly wasn’t CM in flavor and it was a bit of a treadmill.
I’m also looking at MFW AHL for 9th as we want to get the ancients done in a year. I have read here that one could do all SCM first 3 modules in a year, but I don’t see how…Also, I’m not sure I even want my little ones sitting in on the ancients’ readings.
What do to? 🙂
JFG
JFG I will be doing Mysterie of History for this reason, it covers from the beginning to Jesus’s time. I didn’t get the best feedback on this site but know a few people who loved it. I will implement w/living books…
Thanks Petitemom~ did you mean for the reason to do it all in one year or that you didn’t want your littles sitting in on all the Ancient readings. We have used MOH for Reformation and it seemed more frienddly to littles…
JFG
I just like the idea to cover more in one year. My oldest will be in 6th grade this year and we are just starting Ancient history. I do not have any idea how much the younger ones will sit tru! we’ll see!!
You can read a Bible Storybook through in a year. We did Modules 3, 4, & most of 5 in one year. We read Bible lessons each day, usually more than one lesson and we read one or two history lessons a day. We read all of the NT this year which is read in modules 3-6. next year we are reading the OT from modules 1 & 2 along with Module 6 and a bit of Module 5 for History.
My daughter is in high school so we read the real Bible but for elementary age I would go with a Bible Storybook like The Golden Bible. It is good to get the flow of the Bible story which goes from Genesis to Revelation to see the big picture. Your children have the rest of their lives to study it in detail. I like them to get the big picture when they are young.
I’ve heard that you only need to read four chapters a day to read the Bible through in a year so it is certainly possible to cover it all in a school year being the schedule doesn’t read it all anyway.
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