We switched from MFW because of the “something missing” too… it took me a long time to finally define what that was for us.
It was partly the box-checking and feeling rushed to keep up.
It was partly that it didn’t really cover as wide of an age range as it was supposed to and so I felt that I was constantly pushing some of my kids to keep up or having to hold others back, and that wasn’t the way I wanted to school. I mean, that sounds a lot like a classroom doesn’t it?
But it was more than that. Eventually it dawned on me that MFW just doesn’t rely on living books as much as I wanted to in my home school. They do include living books … but they also include a fair amount of other books that I would not consider to be living books.
The more I learn about CM, the more I realize that MFW is not strongly CM, especially as you go further up in the 5-year cycle. Even ECC is what I would consider to be heavy with busy work that we had to tweak/drop.
I know you were looking for a comparison to SCM and I haven’t used any of the SCM guides yet, so I can’t help you there. But I thought it might be helpful to hear from someone who stopped using MFW for the reasons you mentioned. I can say that we’ve been using a large portion of the free curriculum guide on this site for the last couple of years and it has been *so* helpful for us.
~Jenn