A warm-up is a short activity at the start of a lesson.  Warm-ups help jump-start students' thinking and have many purposes including:

• to introduce a new topic
• to reinforce skills
• to motivate students
• to prepare students to learn
• to assess how much students know
• to develop students’ creative thinking

The following warm-up uses an everyday object, a measuring cup, to encourage students’ creative thinking.  It is adapted from Gilford’s Alternative Uses Task (1967) in which participants list as many possible uses for a common house hold item.  The warm-up develops fluency, which is the ability to generate new ideas.  Fluency, along with flexibility, originality, and elaboration are behaviors often associated with creativity.

List all the things a measuring cup can be used for (other than to measure ingredients).

What else. . .?