There were a number of new homeschool moms at that support group meeting, their glazed eyes and desperate expressions reflecting the enormity of the task they'd taken on.

The topic was “planning and organizing” and attendance was high, for this is a popular topic among homeschoolers, along with keeping it all together, homeschooling with toddlers underfoot, and homeschooling high school. A number of veteran homeschool moms had been asked to attend this meeting, to share from their experience and offer resources that they'd found helpful.

The first to speak mentioned Donna Young, and heads nodded. Several more mentioned donnayoung.org in passing, and one organized soul who'd printed out a list of resources included donnayoung.org on her list. Who is Donna Young, you ask? She's a homeschool mom! I suppose you might call her a retired homeschool mom, having “finished” last year, but the best homeschool moms I know don't retire, they just keep on mentoring younger moms, providing encouragement and advice and sometimes just a shoulder to cry on.

Donna Young has been offering support to the online homeschool community for years now. Her website provides a plethora of free forms, schedules, planners for both academics and household, worksheets, and more. If you're using Apologia Science you can find schedules for study or co-ops. There are handwriting worksheets, a discussion of how to teach handwriting, and art instruction. Links lead to a template for a nature journal, reading schedules for various textbooks, even teacher training (homeschool planning in general, lesson planning in particular, even advice for scheduling lessons using several popular curriculum options). What I've listed here is only a very small sampling of a very large website!

The website is just a taste of what you'll find on the YoungMinds CD. The CD runs in your browser and works like a website, with clickable links, and contains many pages and printable forms in PDF, DOC, XLS or RTF format. The CD contains two sections, one that retains the look and feel of donnayoung.org and another (YoungMinds) that mirrors what this gifted organizer has on her own computer.

The author allows you, the purchaser, to copy the contents of the CD to your hard drive for faster access and provides step-by-step instructions complete with screenshots to help you.

“Helpful” would be the operative word for this material. If you are a bewildered new homeschooler, step through the planning process, printing and filling out the forms you need as you go. If you're an experienced homeschooler planning for next year (and looking for things to go smoother), you can do the same. A couple of times in our years of homeschooling I've hit the wall and had to start over, in a manner of speaking, because things were not working. Donna Young's planning process helped us to get back on track.

Paging through the planning section of the YoungMinds CD I see the same approach as on the website, expanded, step-by-step explanation, with lots of examples of how it works with real books, real resources, real lessons. It's easy to be sidetracked, clicking on a link to look at an example, but just as easy to get back to where you were a minute ago. Everything has been carefully thought out, carefully laid out, and nicely tied together.

Exploring the YoungMinds CD is rather like a treasure hunt. In the past hour, just looking about I came across (besides the aforementioned items) game boards for making games, blank cards suitable for flash cards or card games, bingo cards, book report forms, blank and labeled maps, timelines, images of the presidents, the text of historical documents, a Fine Arts timeline partially filled in with representative paintings of artists plus composers by century and Internet links to biographies and further resources, notebooking pages, writing classes (Grades 3-9) from “sentence starters” to “how to write a research paper” along with copywork and dictation ideas for all grades, articles and blog entries (such as “Homeschooling Musts for Kids” and “Family Boot Camp,” lists you can use to design a course of study, and a copywork resource notebook of George Washington's Rules of Civility!

I can think of a number of reasons to buy this CD-Rom: Your Internet connection is slow or unreliable, you like what you see on the website and want more, or you've been blessed over the years by Donna Young's unselfish ministry to homeschoolers and you'd like to encourage and bless her in return. Any of these is an excellent reason, and yet another is that the YoungMinds CD-ROM is a resource that will provide you an invaluable homeschool and household aid for years to come.