Playing FreeRice.com allows you the opportunity to improve your mind while earning rice that will be donated through the UN World Food Program. There are several subjects that you can choose to test on, with Vocabulary being the most popular. Correct answers progress the game to more challenging levels. You can adjust the difficulty level back to Level 1 which is about a second grade level. Students could be taught to multitask and use an online dictionary such as WordCentral and look up words they don’t know.
Other subject areas in Free Rice include: Art, Chemistry, English Grammar, Geography, Math, or even Language Learning (French, German, Italian, or Spanish).
Playing Free Rice can be addictive, but what a great addiction! Improve yourself and help feed the hungry.
When using with students, I suggest using an online dictionary, such as Word Central, to look up words they don’t know. Students can multi-task by copying from Free Rice the word they don’t know, pasting it in the online dictionary, reading the definition, and then applying the learned knowledge to choose the best answer. This way they will learn new vocabulary and earn more rice.
The use of Free Rice can also be intergrated into Math and Social Studies lessons. Teaching a global awareness of our responsibility to help others in need. Free Rice has information on their website about how much and where the rice is being donated. As a math lesson, the total amount of rice earned by each student and/or the class could be recorded on a chart or spreadsheet. Students could estimate how many grains of rice it takes to fill one bowl and then determine how many correct answers they (or the class) would have to get to equal one whole bowl.
