[What do you mean when you say "providential" view of history?]

#1 and going beyond that, to say that God has specially blessed America as the New Israel. The Puritans may have believed that, but they were only ONE of the founding groups of the 13 colonies.

 

Would you mind telling me which curriculum you believe does that--and does the curriculum itself imply that that's true, or just acknowledge that the Puritans thought that? I haven't seen any of SL's history curriculum at all (it's not in the preschool/PreK levels), and I've only seen the free 3-week sample of Year 1 from TOG.

 

Thank you!

[What do you mean when you say "providential" view of history?]

When you say that a curriculum takes a "providential" view of history, do you mean ...

 

(1) It takes the view that God ordained everything in history to happen, and it all happened in accordance with His will--He was there, actively causing things to happen exactly as they did? (I.e., there's no problem with--or the accompanying problems are glossed over--the white people being cruel to the Native Americans, because it was their Manifest Destiny to expand westward whatever it took?)

 

(2) It takes the view that God is present at all points of history, and He knew ahead of time what would happen/what people would choose to do and worked within the situation, even though it wasn't what He wanted (people chose sinfully)--the curriculum acknowledges His presence and worknig behind the scenes but doesn't necessarily imply His endorsement of everything that happened? (I.e., it was wrong for the white people to treat the Native Americans so awfully, even though God allowed it to happen?)

 

(3) Something else entirely?

 

I've seen the word applied to Sonlight and Tapestry of Grace, usually as a negative descriptor, and am just wondering what is meant by it. I'm currently using Sonlight for my daughter's preschool and will start using it soon for PreK. I'm almost certainly going to switch to something else for K and beyond, but haven't decided what yet--TOG is a possibility, though. I'm ok with the second option above but not the first, so if TOG falls into the first category, I should cross it off the list now.

[Keeping it ALL together - meal planning, cleaning, discipline, school, etc]

following because I need help with this too!

 

[Current envelope system users - how long have you been at it?]

We've used the envelope system for ... I don't know, maybe 6 years or so? I don't recall exactly when we started. It was sometime before May 2008, but I'm not sure when exactly. I know we did it in fits and starts for a while, figuring out what worked for us.

 

It got significantly easier after May 2008. That would be when we moved from the US to Egypt (at the beginning of my husband's career with the US Department of State). Credit card fraud was HUGE in Egypt, and most shops didn't accept cards anyway. So we quickly developed a hybrid system that we still use today--and that we'd continue to use if we moved back to the US, because we've finally gotten it tweaked just right for us.

 

First--we don't do all cash. In our current situation, we can't, and even if we could, some things would be easier on the card, and we wouldn't spend more money on the card anyway (i.e., online purchases and gas, if we were in the States--we pay cash for gas here because credit card fraud is rampant and because we have to go in anyway to sign the form that exempts diplomats from the Value Added Tax). Currently we use the debit card for online purchases (of which we make a lot, because there's a lot that's not available where we live) and for rare purchases at the military PX that we have access to--we spend big bucks on those rare occasions that we go there, and we probably would do better to use cash, but we don't. Those trips are rare and are budgeted for.

 

One of the hardest things for us when we started was the idea that we only had one envelope for each category, and we both spent money out of those categories--so where should the envelopes live: in my purse, in his wallet, in the house? That got easier when we had our daughter and I started staying home with her. Now most of the envelopes stay at home or in my purse. The two categories that my husband does most of the spending in live in separate areas of his wallet. And lots of budget categories stay in the bank until we anticipate using them, at which point we get out what we anticipate needing and store that money wherever makes sense at the time.

 

Our current envelope categories include:

-Supermarket

-Other food (mostly restaurants now, but also farmer's market type expenditures)

-My husband's lunch money (lives in his wallet)

-Gas (lives in his wallet)

-Taxi money

-Home decor money (most of this lives in the bank account, but we use it often enough to have a dedicated envelope)

-Babysitting/lawn care (these are each once a month expenses of relatively fixed amounts, so we combine them so we don't run out of envelopes)

 

There may be one or two more, but I don't have them in front of me right now, and those are the major ones.

 

You may have noticed major budget categories that are not included in the envelopes--auto maintenance, discretionary money for each of us, clothing, entertainment, etc. We don't have to have cash envelopes for those because, in addition to DR's envelopes, we use YNAB budgeting software. We can leave all of that money in the bank and use YNAB to keep track of our budget categories as if they were virtual envelopes. This works really well for us because some of those categories are not-often-used ones (auto maintenance, for example), some are paid by online transfer (insurance, for example), and others may be used in brick and mortar stores (in which case we get out cash first) or online (discretionary, clothing, etc). By leaving the money in the bank until it's needed, but keeping a detailed budget in YNAB, we maintain the flexibility and don't have large amounts of cash on hand.

 

We tried DR's budgeting software but it didn't work well for us. I think it was too hard to customize all the different categories we wanted. With YNAB, it's easy. We love the combination of DR's envelopes and YNAB's software.

 

I'm happy to answer any questions you have about either, or about how we've combined them into a system that works for us.

 

(YNAB = You Need A Budget, by the way :001_smile:  )

 

(Edited because apparently my math skills need work ... since 2008 would be 6 years, not my originally typed 5!)

[Sonlight does it again]

I'm confused about the SL cores D and E. They list Core D, Core E, and also Core D+E. What's the difference? Are D and E completely separate and D+E is some of each of the two? Why the overlap?

 

D and E are a 2-year course in American History, with D covering Native Americans to 1850 and E covering from 1850 on. D+E is a consolidated 1-year course in American History that covers from Native Americans to present (or at least recent, I guess), for those who don't want to take 2 years to do it. So it's very similar, uses some of the same books, but is a shortened version of the course. It's the sam deal with cores B, C, and B+C, only with World History.