Here’s a sponge activity that teachers can use that encourages students to look for relationships between concepts AND has students speak in complete sentences.

It’s called…”mixmaster”.

The teacher simply selects two words and calls out “mixmaster”. Students must then use those two words in a sentence.

For example, a teacher might say, “Liter/quart - mixmaster” and then one student may respond with, “The liter and quart are both units of measurement.” Another student may have a completely different reposnse, but in both cases the students answered complete sentences and formed relationships between two concepts.

There are several ways teachers can go about setting up this sponge activity…teachers can have voltuneers respond to the mixmaster words, it can be played in a round-robin style, students can call-out the name of the next person to answer, or the teacher can simply have all students write down an answer and then pair & share their responses.

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