Back to School: Go Online for Homework Help

Oh, it's so hard to think about homework just yet. But it's coming. Lots of it. So to prepare for the start of the school year, I've pulled together a list of favorite homework help sites on the web, and added a few new ones for a new year.

Scholastic's Kids' Homework Hub - This helpful site offers kids help to organize, prepare, practice, research, and write. Kids can make their own flash cards for math, vocabulary, and history facts with a flash card maker tool under Everyday Essentials.

Kid Info - You'll find lots of history topics as well as geography/social studies, health, nutrition, and computers to name a few.

Time for Kids Homework Helper - Kids can search easily by subject and also find links to other homework help sites recommended by other kids.

Kids Web Homework Hangout - I like this site because it links to kid-friendly search engines and research sites vetted by librarians at the Mid-Continent Public Library in Independence, Mo.

Infoplease Homework Center - A nice all-encompassing site that links to reference sources, subjects, skills, and offers some useful tools. New this year are tools to calculate distances between U.S. locations and longitude and latitude in the United States.

BJ Pinchbeck's Homework Helper - BJ Pinchbeck offers peer-to-peer homework help on the Discovery Channel's discoveryschool.com.

Those are all free resources. Here are two that require fees to dig deeper for material:

Cosmeo - The Discovery Channel's subscription-based homework help site, where teachers explain answers to questions. The fee: $9.95 a month or $99 a year, but you can try it out free for 30 days to see if it really fits your kids' homework needs.

Encyclopaedia Britannica - Offers a student online edition for $70 a year, but you can try it out for free for seven days.

That's a start on the homework bookmarks. Feel free to add homework sites below that have helped your kids in a pinch or with a big project.