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).
![Developing Creative Fluency: List all the things a measuring cup can be used for](https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/dimension=724x10000:format=jpg/path/s03f5891f8d9f9cb5/image/ie9c3f396875827ca/version/1466475770/developing-creative-fluency-list-all-the-things-a-measuring-cup-can-be-used-for.jpg)
What else. . .?