If you haven’t tried Free Rice, you should! Not only is it a great vocabulary-building — not to mention addicting — game, but it also provides rice to people in need through the United Nations World Food Program.

According to the WFP site, the Free Rice game has enabled people to donate “enough rice to feed one million people for one day.” Advertisers pay for ads, and the generated funds are used to purchase the rice that is distributed by the WFP.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the game asks you to choose the best synonym of a given word from four choices. When you click your choice, it either tells you you’re correct, or it gives you the correct answer. You can set your options to quiz you again on words you get wrong or not.

There are 55 levels of difficulty, and the game adjusts to your current vocabulary level. It keeps up with your current level and your highest level from visit to visit. For each correct answer, twenty grains of rice are donated, and you can see how many grains of rice total you have donated.

I’m exploring ideas on how to use this activity with my students. Maybe it could be a bonus for finishing work early, although they’d have to switch around, since we only have three computers. If you use Free Rice with your students, I’d love to hear how you incorporate it. :)

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