Online lesson planner from Home School, Inc.

Many people homeschooling their preschoolers don't really need a lot of organization, but occasionally it comes in handy. I honestly don't believe most preschool families need much in the way of structure, but for those that do, you might want to check out Home School, Inc.'s online planner. This is a nifty little tool for quickly recording simple lesson plans and courses online. Go to the link, and click "Free Web Based Planner" to check it out. The interface isn't gorgeous, but it's functional and pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it.

Online recording is nice because you can access it from anywhere, making it easier to communicate with a working spouse or friends who are doing a class with you (OK, at this age it's really a playgroup). It's also no-paper, which is nice for clutter-prone people like me.

This tool might be especially useful for parents with many children at different levels, who may want to record activities for their Tots to do while they work with older children on activities that just aren't fun for the younger ones. Another group that might find this useful are families which are splitting homeschooling duties in some way, just to organize the communication.

If this is more structure than you need, but a simple list of things you want to try or paper calendar just isn't quite organized enough, consider using Google Calendar. You can create a calendar just for homeschooling and share it out to friends who use Google Calendar. You can even overlay it over other calendars you create. For example, you could make one calendar for homeschooling, one for daily life, and one for the father's work schedule, and then view one, two, or all of them at once just by selecting their check boxes.

We've used the Home School, Inc. tool for our family, and liked it when we were dividing homeschooling work. Now, however, I'm doing all the homeschooling. I just have a file on my computer desktop called "ToDo_projects.txt" that contains a list of things I think would be cool to do with the kids some day. Each week I pick out a few to try to get around to and then do half of those and a bunch of stuff that never made the list (like, this week we've decided to put in a sandbox - which wasn't on the original agenda).

What do you do to organize your homeschooling (or do you like to be structure-free, and how does that work for you)? I know Carisa tells all here - do you have a link to a blog post where you discuss your style of organizing?