Donate rice as you improve your vocab - Azara Feroz Sayed

I came across this site http://freerice.com/index.php which provides you words with alternatives of its meaning. The complexity of the next word is based on the success of your earlier word. Everytime you get a correct word - few grains of Rice are donated to the UN program. Mark this URL in your favourites. We don't have any registration process which makes it even better. I usually use it when I have to take a break from looking hard at the screen. I keep clicking on the words till I hit the word I don't know the meaning. I stop at that and than use of the sites like http://thinkexist.com/dictionary/meaning/imprecate/ and take a print of the page. Having it on my desk and on my bed later in the day - helps me to read the synonyms and antonyms for that word thru the day. This has become my personal word-of-the-day feed.

There are some simple techniques to increase retention of the new words that I read about, apart from relating the word and making the connection which would be always the best, like hearing the word (the freerice site does provides for that) and than repeating the word as you heard. Reading the spelling of the word in your mind without looking at the word and then reversing the spelling of the word in your mind without looking at the word.

The freerice stuff made me search for better techniques for increasing vocab. I am told "30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary" has some good techniques. I am waiting on the hold for this book from the library. Will blog on that once I get my hands on it.

We all know that reading is the best way to increase vocabulary. http://www.edarticle.com/differentiated-learning/increasing-vocabulary-through-activities.html is an article about activities you can indulge in to increase your reading apart from your regular reading of newspaper, blogs, books.

Also http://www.increasevocabulary.net/open-your-mind.html has some tips for increasing your vocabulary. Playing word games like scrabble downloaded from Yahoo!Games with Mavern(computer partner) is one good way to observe usage of words that the computer uses that aren't familiar to you. This needs atleast an hour which would be difficult during weekdays and freerice is more convinient in that sense but would be good for kids, teenagers.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/646489/increasing_your_vocabulary_through.html?page=2 is a very good article about motivating teenagers to focus on increasing their vocab so that they can intelligently communicate with friends on facebook offcourse this would be apart from increasing their SAT score

http://lettersfromthedesert.blogspot.com/2007/06/increasing-vocabulary.html is an interesting blog about a Mom's effort in creatively increasing the vocab of her toddler