Confused! Continue with MFW or switch to SCM?

We have also used MFW for the past two years and now find myself switching. We have not done SCM yet and truth be told the main reason for switching is financial. I can find a lot of the support books at our local library. I am still in the planning stages but feel so confident that we are going to have a great year. We liked MFW, but I got bored this past year with it. I found myself looking so hard at the “schedule”, and raking my kids over the coals with “what had to be done next”. I didn’t like that at all. I want a more relaxed learning environment and hope to get that with SCM.

We tried MFW ECC this year and it did not fit us at all. It does seem to be lacking “something” but I am not sure what that would be. I just felt my kids were not getting enough but I had no clue or time to find supplementation. We pushed through it and are finally done with it.

I am also looking at using SCM for budget reasons. I have reached the point I am tired of spending so much for so little that works for us. CM should fit us perfectly…I pray anyway. This is my 3rd year homeschooling and seeing money being wasted on “boxed curriculum”.

Mind you, boxed curriculum works for some folks. It is just not working for us.

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