Have you heard of the expression “Six Degrees of Separation?” It’s a theory that echoes what you already know as a reader of National Geographic: we’re all interconnected. It says that you and I are connected to every other person on earth through at most six other people.

This February, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is putting this theory to the test to change the world through its inaugural World Freerice Week, February 6-12.  Freerice is an online trivia game that turns your right answers into real grains of rice for the hungry. As the world’s largest organization fighting hunger, WFP feeds over 90 million people worldwide every year. It’s a pretty big task. Playing Freerice is one of the most powerful ways WFP’s global community empowers them to rise to the challenge.

Themed “Six Degrees of Freerice,” the idea behind this World Freerice
Week is simple. WFP is asking its community to invite six friends to
join Freerice. Those six friends are then challenged to invite six more
friends. And so on. Leading up to the week, Freerice had already amassed over
one million registered users. You can imagine that as people
across the globe tap into their networks, the online movement to
solve hunger will exponentially explode. As young people get their friends
and neighbors on board to spread the word, the week will become a celebration
of all we can accomplish together.

Throughout World Freerice Week and even after the week is over, you can bring Freerice into the
classroom and empower your students to see that the solution to hunger
begins with them.  Here are two brand new lesson plans from WFP that use
Freerice to teach students how knowledge of geography can help
them tackle hunger.