Kids Boost Vocabulary While Feeding the World
By Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 11/30/2007 5:00:00 AM
Imagine what it would be like if your students could actually learn new vocabulary words and help feed the world.
That's the concept behind a new World Food Programme (WFP)-affiliated Web site called Free Rice.
Launched on October 7, the site offers students (and philanthropic adults) a game in which the challenge is to match the right synonyms to a list of vocabulary words—10,000 in all, representing 50 levels of difficulty. For every right answer, the Web site's corporate sponsors donate 20 grains of rice to WFP aid projects in developing nations like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sudan, and Ethiopia.
The mission of the WFP, a United Nations agency, is reduce the number of hungry people worldwide. In 2006, the agency fed 87.8 million people in 78 countries.
FreeRice shares that goal. And its concept of partnering hunger aid with education is taking off in schools. Since the site’s launch, freerice.com has donated over four billion grains, including about 188 million grains on a recent day. And John Breen, the Bloomington, IN, computer programmer who created the site's technology, says there's no reason to worry that sponsors like Toshiba, Google, and Fujitsu will back out as the site’s "hits" increase.
"Rice is actually kind of cheap; that's the sad thing," says Breen, who also created the Web sites poverty.com, which educates visitors about the preventable worldwide causes of death, such as hunger, AIDS, and malaria, and the Hunger Site, which launched in 1999 and also pairs corporate sponsors and food donations.
"There are 25,000 people dying every day of hunger, and the majority—four-fifths—are children," adds Breen. "Yet there's plenty of food in the world; we're paying people not to grow food. It's kind of a no-brainer that that shouldn't be happening.
Students who log on to the site encounter "Level 10" words like "streamer" and "inducement." If they get those meanings right, they're promoted to a higher level. The penultimate "Level 50" offers mind-boggling words like cenacle (a small dining room) and litotes (double negatives). Students who fail at Level 10, on the other hand, get demoted to lower levels.
The FreeRice site also offers links to valuable resources about world hunger for young learners, such as WFP's Food for Education program, which feeds children in developing countries while they're at school, and gives their families extra food rations. Another "game" WFP site which teaches about world hunger is www.food-force.com.
Teachers and librarians have been enthusiastic in their email feedback. An anonymous feedback feature on FreeRice prompted so many hundreds of responses that Breen said he had to take it down.
There have also been direct responses "My kids love it," Lee Heffernan, a Bloomington teacher, told Breen. "They say, 'Can we stay in from recess and play Free Rice?'"
And then there was this from Stephanie Disrude, a teacher of fourth and fifth graders on the Yurok Indian reservation in Klamath, CA, who emailed the WFP. "My students absolutely LOVE the free rice site. Almost daily they earn several thousand grains of rice!" she wrote.
"You cannot imagine the joy in my heart when I look out and see 25 kids doing vocabulary work and enjoying it."
