http://teacher.scholastic.com/tools
Start your year and your students' Web searches off right by taking advantage of Scholastic's free homepage builder, which allows you to post homework assignments, showcase student work, and easily communicate with parents and students. The best part? You can create your site in minutes.

www.ajkids.com
What is an adjective? What does the President do? Enter these questions anywhere else, and you'll get a maze of results, with some related sites, and others...not. Not at Ask Jeeves for Kids, which lets kids ask questions in their own language and returns only editor-chosen, kid-appropriate content. It's the best site for the youngest browsers.

www.gaggle.net
Many schools can't offer students their own e-mail accounts, and you may be wary about recommending any of the free e-mail programs, which are often targets for off-color spam. Gaggle offers free, filtered e-mail for students and teachers, so your students can safely message experts, pen pals, or their favorite authors with ease.

www.scholastic.com/kids
Want to take advantage of every opportunity to celebrate literacy? Select Scholastic's site for kids as the homepage for your classroom computers. With links to students' favorite series, authors' bios, and more, children will be reminded of the wide world of books every time they hit the World Wide Web.

www.google.com
The gold standard in Web crawling deserves mention. Its simple format and large returns make it an easy (although unfiltered) tool for Web users at every level. Don't miss the “Language Tools” or the “Images” search, which returns only photos and illustrations.

www.awesomelibrary.org
At this site kids will find links, organized by school subject, to a huge variety of experts ready to answer student questions. Professions include dentists, dietitians, dinosaur experts, and more. Plus: Many ELL kids will be able to search in their own language.

www.itools.com
“To be, or not to be?” That's the question, but who asked it? Curious kids can find out by entering any famous saying in the “Quotations” field of this all-in-one search engine. Other tools perfect for intermediate students include a dictionary, a biography search, and a text translator.

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/KidsClick!
Whether they're researching martial arts, pen pals, or inventions, students browse the Web for the same topics again and again. This site, created by a librarian, contains direct links to many children's favorite subjects, such as pets, spacecraft, and sports-making it a one-stopshopping center for loads of kid-friendly info.

http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday
Watch your middle- to upper-graders' vocabulary grow day by day with the help of this site, which provides a definition and several example sentences for a new delightful word each day.

www.enchantedlearning.com/dictionary
When primary graders click on p at this interactive dictionary, they´ll see pictures of hundreds of objects, including a penny, a pizza, and a puppet. If they click on any object, such as a peacock, they´ll be taken to an page that explains the topic in more detail.

 
Hannah Trierweiler is the assistant editor of Instructor. This article was originally published in the August 2004 issue.