My Father's World or Genesis through Deuteronomy and Ancient Egypt?

Meesh,

Hi! I could have written most of your post a couple of months ago! I too, have a 4th & a 2nd grader. We love MFW, and actually find it to be very CM friendly, which I know is one of their goals. It is a wonderful curriculum.

I commend you for the notebooking. It’s something I could never quite remember to have my kids do.

Anyway, we began this school year in MFW Creation to Greeks, but I wanted even more of a true CM approach. Long story short, we switched to Genesis through Deuteronomy just before Christmas (just jumped into Ancient Egypt) and I LOVE it! I find it to be very much enough, but it IS less than MFW, or it feels like it to me, which is why I love it!

I haven’t added anything, except some books that we already had on hand.

Boy of the Pyramids, one of the books on the list, was phenomenal. It held my kids’ interest, and we learned so much. I kept thinking while reading it that THIS is what a living book is all about. Even as an adult, I learned so much from this little book that I never knew about Egypt!

So, I write all this to praise Gen.-Deu. For us, it works better, but it’s because of ME. I found MFW to be too structured, too MUCH. That’s just me. I find, Gen. – Deut. to be very straightforward, more bare bones, which was a huge breath of fresh air to me. I was a mom who had a drastic paradigm shift from always worrying about “Am I doing enough?” to “I’m doing too much! Help!”.And then I found SCM, and we are finally enjoying school again.

I guess it’s in knowing what kind of mom you are. I have a couple of friends who thrive on MFW, but we have very different personalities.

I’m sure you’ve done this already, but if you haven’t, the sample lessons are very helpful.

Oh, and I wouldn’t worry about “the cycle” too much! Who says they stop learning after 12th grade, right?

I pray you’ll find peace with your decision. I am the most indecisive person in the world, so I can empathize with you!

Blessings!

I haven’t used MFW, but I wanted to tell you that Genesis through Deuteronomy is the lightest of the six Modules. Just a little FYI. I came from a stuctured weekly grid boxed curriculum to CM and I feel we are reading more, just different. I can pray with my kids and we can choose additional books together if we feel we need more. SCM’s book lists are so wonderful. Our current favorite is Outdoor Secrets.

Blessings,

Cindie

I don’t have older ones in high school but I feel we read a lot of bible with SCM.  I started wondering if it was almost 2 much (oldest is 11 and 5 boys younger and reading about 20 minutes a day or more ?? ).  Felt like a lot lately, but I asked them if they are enjoying all of history and they said yes, I asked them if bible is hard to understand or to long and I was totally suprised they said NO.  So I guess we are doing good, see what I knew.  Thanks be the Lord I asked and he answered through them.  I was beginning to feel like it was all over there heads.

Anyway I love SCM and plan on keep using it.  I feel it is equal in all things, bible, living books and room for my families flexability.  Misty

I could have written this post!  We’re switcjing from MFW to SCM next year.  I will have a 3rd grader, K-er, and preschooler.  How did the switch work out for you?

Just a quick thought after skimming through this post. This is our 3rd year using SCM and because we do a co-op on Mondays I decided to break the Bible lesssons in half and do them over 4 days as part of our devotions. This works well and we are progressing through the lesson plans at a good pace despite not doing any of it on Mondays. Also, the shorter Bible readings allow for more discussion time. I find SCM helpful bc the legwork of finding living books is done for me but I can easily tailor our home school to make it our own. Hope you find what works! This forum is a great resource.

Ashley if I had kids in your age range and they enjoyed hands on projects, coloring, etc I would use the MFW American history that they put out for 2nd/3rd grade. Adventures in MFWor something I think. We did that when my oldest was in 3rd and it was a fun year. The ECC is a little dry for little ones. I did it with a 4th/2nd/prek and no one really enjoyed it. The Kingdom Tales was fun and there were good aspects, I think it was the Christian Heroes Then and Now missionary stories that we found dry. Sadly we just did not enjoy any of these books. If I were to do it again I would find something to replace those. The publisher of those have a younger kid version that has a rhyming story that my kids liked. If I remember correctly the rest of it was enjoyable. Fun art projects, mapwork. I think maybe my kids were just not mature enough at the time.

I have a 3rd grader and a 2 year-old, and we have used SCM Gen-Deut and Joshua-Malachi. We’ll be diving into Ancient Rome and Matthew-Acts this year. I haven’t used MFW, but I will sat that SCM really does history and Bible in such a beautiful way that makes so much sense. My son has loved our Bible, history and geography studies.

CM felt overwhelming to me at first, but the SCM lesson plans have really empowered me to understand how to plan and manage our days, not only in Bible, Hist & Geography, and it is amazing what we have all learned together. I have never felt overloaded with it. There were a few days when we split up a Bible reading, just allow my son to digest it, but this does not happen often. It is very flexible. I have never felt the need to add to the plans, but have added a thing or two just for fun. For example, we wanted to learn more about hieroglyphics, so I ordered a hieroglyphic stamp set from Amazon for us to play with. We were intrigued with King Tut, and ordered a book about him, too. There is room to add if you like, which I love. If you like to do Bible 5 days per week, you couls split up the lessons, or do your own thing on Thurs and Fri. We either catch-up on a Bible reading, or get into our own end-of-the-week Bible plan.

I don’t know of any study guides for the books on the book list. I will say that doing narration has made such an impact, and I don’t kmow that I would feel the need for any additional questions just because my son has retained so much through these studies. Narrating has really helped us to think critically about what we have heard.

Notebooking is something I’d like to try. It’s great that you are doing notebooks! You could easily notebook with topics from the Gen- Deut with any of the Bible lessons, Ancient Egypt, or Africa in Geography. A quick glance at the lesson plan table of contents would give you plenty of notebooking inspiration. 🙂

It will be totally fine if you cycle through all six modules, and end up with Joshua-Malachi. Each SCM guide has book lists specific to grade levels to complete as a family, or independently (older kids). The independent book list for 6th grade in Greek history/ Joshua-Malachi will be different than those in 12th grade, when ypu cycle through it again. I hope that helps. 🙂