I have always loved really big words. I love to use them as often as I can. Little did I know that this would come in really handy when it came time to take the GRE for graduate school. Prestidigitation means magic. Loquacious means you use 10 words when 1 would have sufficed. Or close to that. My kids also have a love of this and we used to challenge each other all the time, but I think my daughter Karen won a long time ago when she brought home floccinaucinihilipilification which means to describe something as worthless. I no longer have to put that in quotes because it has been a part of the family lexicon (vocabulary) for 20 years. In fact, I couldn't put it in quotes, or credit it to anyone because I can't even remember where she learned it way back then.
The point to all this was my latest assignment, which was to find a lesson plan that used flickr. Which I did indeed do. However, I found that the teacher's idea was somewhat flawed. She started with the idea that students could take new vocabulary words and look them up on flickr in order to see pictures that could give them clues to the definitions of the words. Great idea, but she didn't stop there. She rode it right off the rails by having the students go to other websites, which circled right back to flickr with several useless steps. She ended with a cute mini movie making session that seemed fun but pointless.
I liked her idea of using flickr to figure out definitions, but I'd like to stick with just that and take it further. I think it could be used at any grade level, regardless of the word. Obviously some words would not be found on flickr. For those words, the students could look them up in a real dictionary or thesaurus. In many cases, the resulting words would probably still be unfamiliar, then these words could be looked up on flickr, and so on. It could prove to be quite a challenging game. I think the student would enjoy it, and learn several things from it:
1. How to use flickr.
2. Improve dictionary skills.
3. Improve thesaurus skills.
4. Improve vocabulary.
No matter what students are going to do with their lives, they need to have language skills, but especially if they have any ambition at all, a rudimentary vocabulary is required. If they expect to achieve anything, then a more proficient vocabulary is expected, and this is one way they can acquire it. Students love competition, they love to play games, give them a list of words, a computer, the web address to flickr.com, a dictionary, a thesaurus (try to keep it a little old school) and let the games and learning begin!
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