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SCM vs Story of the World
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I am trying to decide on curriculum for my son for the coming year – grade 2. I was really leaning toward the SCM History/Geography/Bible guide as a spine, and then filling in other subjects on my own using the SCM recommendations as a general guide. But a friend was recently telling me about Story of the World, and now I’m wondering which history curriculum I should use?
Can anyone speak to this? Experiences with either or both?
Thank you!!
We used SoTW five years ago (and for the two years previous to that…..we started our homeschooling with SoTW). I really liked the map activities, and for the younger kids (4th grade and under), the coloring pages were great.
What I didn’t like was that it seemed to jump around the world, and we had trouble keeping the people and places straight.
We switched to SCM, module 6 (Modern) after three years of SoTW. We really enjoyed the spine. And we really enjoyed the assigned reading. SoTW seemed to give too many choices for the additional reading, and the books were sometimes only very loosely connected to the topic being studied…..they were too many twaddle titles, in my opinion.
This new school year marks our return to the Modern time period, and I’m really looking forward to my oldest getting new books to read and my youngers revisiting what my oldest had four years ago. (I combined SCM modules 1 -3 into one year, so wecan keep a 4 year history rotation.
I like SCM’s history guides because we are reading many books from many different writers, so we’re getting more than just one person’s opinion. I also prefer the writing of most of the books SCM suggests over Susan Wise Bauer’s writing.
Right now, just for my own benefit, I’m reading Genevieve Foster’s “Augustus Caesar’s World” (this is one of the books used in the Ancient Rome study). Let’s compare a portion of that with a chapter of SOTW’s chapter on Augustus Caesar…
Augustus Caesar’s World: “Cassius, himself, made the fifth, a lean hungry man, with a sharp nose and a sharp tongue. Having formed the original plot against Caesar, and enlisted Brutus in it, he was now annoyed at Brutus for not letting them kill Mark Antony, too, while their daggers were out. Brutus tried to conceal his righteous indignation. He had behaved only as he believed his great ancestor would have behaved–that noble Brutus of old, whose statue stood on the Capitoline. Cassius had no ancestor to worry him, thank Jupiter, and he didn’t spare his critical remarks about lost opportunities. …
Portia trembled at the thought, and spoke of how near the mob had come to burning down their house after Caesar’s funeral. Servilia thought Brutus and Cassius ought to go abroad as grain commissioners. She had taken pains to have Antony (who was still her friend) get those jobs assigned to them. They should be glad of a real excuse to leave Italy… and avoid civil war, if they could. Brutus admitted he would be willing to go anywhere to avoid war, tough he would hardly choose to be a grain commissioner.
Choose it! sneered Cassius. It was an insult. Judges deserved a better assignment than that! He and Brutus had been praetors (judges) for the year. Would they now take a job rustling grain to feed that common mod of Rome, whom Caesar had toadied to? Not by Jove’s thunderbolt, he wouldn’t!”And from Story of the World: “After Caesar died, Rome was in an uproar! Who would be in charge of Rome now? The people had loved Caesar. They were angry about his death. Some of the senators were angry about Caesar’s death too. Other senators were glad that Caesar was gone. The senators quarreled with each other. The people of Rome were restless. Fights broke out. Rome was a mess, and no one was in charge. …
“One day, Octavian called the whole Senate together. ‘I have made Rome bigger and wealthier than ever,’ he said. ‘Now there is peace, all over the Roman Empire. No one is fighting. No enemies are attacking us. Rome is strong and healthy. So I have decided to quit my job. I don’t need to be consul any more. I won’t lead the army any more. You can be in charge from now on.'”The other thing I really appreciated about SCM’s spines for the Modern Times was how they treated all the wars. The tone of the writing was one of sorrow that there had to be wars; the joyful or good things that happened during the wars were pointed out; I really felt like it was a biblical approach to war — seeing the necessity, but mourning the necessity as well.
I chose to not use SotW because I had read reviews that it was just too consumed with the wars.
And, I’ll just emphasize again that the book list of recommended reading for SCM (well, they are really the scheduled titles) had just so much more substance. The SotW recommended reading lists were rather twaddly.
Thank you so much to you both for your comments! I really appreciated that book comparison – what a difference! That seemed to highlight your comment, Karen, about substance.
I think we will go with the SCM material. However, would it be worthwhile also getting the SotW activity book to supplement as desired? Or would that end up being unnecessary busy work?
The sctivity book is a lot of coloring pages. That’s fine for your little guy. You might be able to pick up a coloring book that’s relevant a lot cheaper than paying the price of the activity book, though.
Of course, the activity book has some homemade type games to make and do, too.When we first switched to SCM, I did miss the coloring pages. My girls were 9, 7, 5, and 3yo. And I felt they needed something to keep their hands busy while I read, so I got some Dover coloring books.
When they got older, I bought the Draw and Write Through History books. Those are very nice, but the little ones need help following the directions, which can be annoying while you’re trying to read a chapter.
I will share what we have done, since it’s a little different. We’ve used the SCM guides as-is for Egypt & Greece (we did all ancients in 1st grade, combining the 3). But for Rome, I felt the spine was just too over his head. So we bought the SOTW book and just read the pertinent portions on Roman history as they fit in with our living books. I wish I would have done that with Greece too, because, again- it was a little over the head for my 1st grader. Then for 2nd grade, we did Middle Ages. I basically broke it up into 4 separate parts- Vikings, Medieval times, Renaissance, and Reformation. We scheduled tons of living books for each period, and used the relevant SOTW chapters to fill in facts & especially to show the transitions (aka- how did we move from learning about ancient Rome to the Vikings? etc.) I don’t like the idea of jumping around from one country/area to another. I’d rather focus in and really live in one place for awhile.
This year (3rd) we’re doing early modern, and we’ll use it as is . I really like the “Stories Of…” spines.
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