Friday 12 September 2008

Free Rice is Going Multi-Lingual and Cross-Curricular




I blogged about Free Rice, an online vocabulary game aiming to improve “word power” while also giving rice to the third world in November last year. Although I did use it as a starter in languages lessons to demonstrate the links between romance languages and English and encourage students to infer meaning from the few latin stems they knew, I always thought it was such a shame the game did not exist in other languages .

Thanks to Marie-France Perkins’, Sans Probleme blog , I have just found out that this oversight has been rectified and not only Free Rice has gone multilingual with games in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian,but also cross-curricular with games covering Art, Maths, Chemistry and Geography.

I could see the English grammar and vocabulary games useful for EFL as well as native students and the Art and Geography games are certainly useful resources for developing cultural awareness.

What now? Let’s test it out and see if it lives up to its promises…

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the tip! Most of my students speak English as a second language so I'll have them do this - great idea.

Unknown said...

I know a student who uses the spanish version of Free Rice as self assessment and consolidation of learning, while helping others - valuable multi-tasking

Paul Beaufait said...

Thank you, indeed, for bookmarking your post about the Free Rice site for the LearningwithComputers Group at Diigo. I teach English as an additional language students, too, and I'm eager to point out to them the games for both language and cultural awareness building.

Maru del Campo said...

Hi Isabelle!
Thanks for showing me this great language tool. I will try to link it to BaeL to foster learning
http://bilingueactivoelear.ning.com

It is awesome the it comes now in different languages and areas.
Have a nice day.
Love: Maru