For your weekly Sunday Surprise I present Free Rice – an excellent and free way to practice vocabulary while donating food to people in need. It does not quite deliver what Ben Franklin meant by his aphorism “Do well by doing good,” but if you have an SAT or ACT or GRE or other sort of standardized test coming up on which your vocabulary will be tested, it might fit the bill.
If you go to the home page, you’ll see a word and four definitions; pick one, and if you chose correctly, Free Rice donates “10 grains” of rice to the World Food Programme, the UN’s food assistance branch. (I imagine they do it by average weight, of course, rather than counting out 10 exactly for each of your words.) If you get a couple right, you rise a level, and 10 more grains are donated for each correct response. Repeat, repeat, repeat!
It’s not only useful if you need to study up for an exam, but quite fun if you like to test or strengthen your vocabulary for personal use. I tried jumping around to various levels, and discovered that I’m hovering around 46/47. I can climb a little higher, but not maintain it. Those levels could become addictive, I think, as well as the little bowl of rice and running tally of how much rice you’ve donated during your stay on the website. (You can also sign up for an account to keep track of your long-term achievements and donations.) I hope this site will be fun and useful for someone else, too!
Thanks to The Pioneer Woman for pointing out this site last week!
puddle-wonderful life 
I love Free Rice. I discovered it last year, when I wasw homeschooling my then 5th-grade daughter, and it was perfect. At that age kids can be really idealistic, so she just loved the idea that she was feeding people while learning grammar. One of the first things she did at her new school this year was make posters about Free Rice, which she posted all over the school.
Wow, that’s really great. It’s awesome to hear of kids using it and spreading the word! One thing I was really impressed with is how many levels there are – it seems like almost anyone, from grade-schoolers up, would be able to find an appropriately challenging level. Is she going to keep using it as her vocabulary advances?
Thanks for sharing a success story! And thanks for stopping by my blog!
The Pioneer Women has been great for helping us to raise rice through raised awareness with her yearly article, and we now have you doing the same thing :) thank you!
You’re welcome!