28 Teacher-Tested, Ready-to-Use Academic Sponge Activities

It’s an unfortunate reality of teaching: Despite all the time and careful planning, lessons don’t always pan out. 

Whether it’s a wasp flying into your classroom and creating instant chaos, technical difficulties with your interactive whiteboard, or an activity that doesn’t take up nearly as much time as you thought, it’s best to expect the unexpected, writes educator Jason DeHart: “While a teacher doesn’t need a MacGyver kit of escape supplies, one or two ideas for a fast go-to can be helpful.”  

It’s times like these when having a collection of easy-to-start academic activities to help you pivot can be a real game-changer, explains Todd Finley, a professor of English education at East Carolina University. You need what educator Madeline Hunter calls a sponge—a “learning activity that soaks up precious time that would otherwise be lost.” These activities help channel students’ energy into enjoyable learning experiences, ensuring that class time remains productive.

Sponge activities are often confused with brain breaks, but they have distinct purposes. Brain breaks are “planned learning activity shifts that mobilize different networks of the brain,” writes neurologist Judy Willis. “These shifts allow those regions that are blocked by stress or high-intensity work to revitalize.” Academic sponges, on the other hand, are “fun and engaging, and have an academic component without seeming too ‘school-ish,’” writes curriculum designer Jessica Boschen. 

We scoured the Edutopia archives and combed through dozens of teacher-tested suggestions to create a list of 28 academically rich and engaging academic sponge activities for every subject. 

English Language Arts

1. Change the Story: Provide students with thought-provoking creative writing prompts linked to content that they can free-write about. For example, how would the novel The Great Gatsby change if Jay Gatsby were not a wealthy man? (Source: For the Teachers)

2. Description Exercise: Choose an object that you’ll have students observe. As a class, they’ll brainstorm as many different words as possible to describe the item. List all the words on the board, and discuss the variety to further highlight the importance of getting creative with the descriptive words that students use when writing. (Source: Reading Rockets)

3. Grammar Scramble: To start this activity from elementary school teacher Ashley Cleveland Jenkins, organize the class in groups of four. One member chooses an adjective, another a noun, and the third a verb. The fourth student writes a sentence using the chosen words. The entire group can then label the parts of speech. Bring the class back together, and have each group share their sentence with the class. Students can vote on which sentence they like best.

Math

4. Beach Ball Toss: On an inflatable beach ball, write a couple of simple and not-so-simple math questions using an erasable marker. Toss the ball into the air. The question that a student’s hand touches when they catch the ball is the one they’ll answer aloud, before tossing the ball to a classmate. (Source: Linda Faulk) 

5. 20 Questions, Math Edition: Have a student volunteer to choose a number at random. Their classmates have 20 opportunities to ask yes-or-no questions to discover what the number is. Students shouldn’t just guess blindly, but intentionally ask pragmatic questions, explains former middle school teacher Rachel Mangum: “Is it a whole number? Is it an even number? Less than 100? A positive number? This is fun because you can use exponents, fractions, integers, etc., and they really have to think about what a number is in a different way.” 

6. Quick Math: Challenge the class to creatively find the answers to unexpected math problems like “How many hands are there in the classroom?” Students can collaborate to reach their final answer, but encourage them not to count one by one. To gain insight into how students approach solving the problem, ask everyone to show their work. (Source: Reading Rockets) 

7. Number Around the Room: Start by choosing a number—for example, 15. Going around the room, each student will share a fact about the number. Someone might say, “A foot plus 3 inches is 15” or “A baker’s dozen plus 2 is 15.” (Source: Miss Kirby)

8. The Price Is Right: A twist on the classic game show. All you need is a newspaper, a supermarket circular, or anything that lists a variety of items with pricing. Pose a number of questions to students like “Which costs more this week, a gallon of milk or a dozen eggs?” or “Which is more expensive, a haircut or a tank of gas?” (Source: Spencer Burton and Scholastic)

9. Buzz: Have a student volunteer to be the starting point. Each person counts on from the student before them; when someone gets to a number “with a 7 in it or that is divisible by 7,” they will say “Buzz” instead of the number, Mangum says. Then the next student continues on with the next number. 

To make the game more difficult for older students, consider introducing conditions based on more complex mathematical operations—for example, “Buzz” for prime numbers, perfect squares, or numbers resulting from addition or subtraction sequences.

Science

10. What Is It?: Place an object in an opaque bag. Students pass the bag around, touching the object through the material but unable to see it. Next, they become inquiry detectives—listing the qualities or characteristics of the item on the board, asking each other questions, and guessing what they think the object is. Encourage students to prompt each other scientifically about the object’s texture, shape, size, weight, temperature, or sound. (Source: Reading Rockets) 

11. Six Things: Students will need a single sheet of paper each, on which they’ll write the numbers 1 through 6—allowing for around three lines’ worth of space between each number. Once everyone is ready, show a video of “a popular experiment addressed by the textbook” or “related to a future lab,” and direct students to “write the six most important steps,” explains high school teacher Ken Wedgwood. Students can discuss the rationale behind their steps in pairs or small groups.

12. Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning: Start off by showing students a video to spark discussion and differing opinions—for example, this fan-created Doritos commercial. Students should come up with a definitive claim, like whether or not the dog in the commercial is responsible for Fluffy the cat going missing. Next, they state the evidence they’ve collected that supports the claim, as well as their scientific reasoning behind the claim. (Source: Teaching Muse)

Social Studies/History

13. Organize a Timeline: After listing five unrelated historical events on the board, have students put them on a timeline in chronological order. Next, ask each student to identify five important events in their own personal histories and put them on a timeline. Responses can be discussed in small groups, or volunteers can share with the class. (Source: Spencer Burton and Scholastic)

14. Career Connections: Have students brainstorm a list of careers that would have been created during a time period the class is studying. For example, if you’re studying the Roman Empire, students might say soldiers and officers, engineers and architects, merchants and traders, farmers and agricultural workers, or artists and sculptors. Have the class write short responses explaining how the career they chose is tethered to the time period. (Source: Michigan Career Education Conference) 

15. History Hustle: In a set amount of time, students will—individually or in small groups—identify as many historical figures as they can think of. Next, you can have them discuss similarities and differences between the figures, or explore the connections between some of the people on the list. This activity can also be done with other topics like wars and battles, historical documents, landmarks and monuments, explorers, and ancient civilizations. (Source: Spencer Burton and Scholastic)

16. Guess Who?: List names of famous historical figures relevant to what you’re studying on slips of paper and put them in a hat. One student draws a name, and with a partner, in small groups, or as a whole class, they answer yes-or-no questions that help their peers guess their identity. 

A fun riff on this activity starts with students putting a Post-it note on their forehead with a vocabulary word or tidbit of information on it—like imperialism or the Great Wall of China. Ensure that students can’t see what is written on their Post-it. They can walk around the room asking questions of their classmates to figure out who or what they are. (Source: Making English Fun)

Activities for Any Class 

17. Blackboard Purge: Start by breaking the class into small groups and assigning each a specific topic. One by one, the clusters of students will share everything they know about their topic on the board. Seated students can raise their hands and chime in, adding missing information or details. (Source: Todd Finley)

18. Peer Pop Quiz: Each student develops a quiz based on newly learned material with five questions and an answer key. Next, everyone exchanges papers with a partner and takes the quiz they’ve been given. (Source: Spencer Burton and Scholastic) 

19. Collect Their Input: Ask students to respond to the following prompt: “What would you like to get out of this unit?” Providing some areas to focus on—from concepts that have tripped them up to topics that pique their interest—can help jump-start the writing process, Wedgwood says.

20. Expert Panel: Choose five students to serve as experts on a core concept from the lesson or unit you’d like to reinforce. As they take 10–15 minutes to prepare and study, the rest of the class will cocreate questions for the panelists. When everyone is ready, have the experts sit in a place where everyone can see them and begin. (Source: Todd Finley)

21. Pipe Cleaners: Providing only a pile of pipe cleaners, challenge small groups of students to build a creative representation of a concept from a previous lesson. The models don’t have to explicitly represent an object like Mount Rushmore, Horton says: “For example, in a government class, students could build a model to represent justice.” 

22. Four Corners: This activity works best in a classroom where there’s room for students to freely walk back and forth. Designate each corner of the room with a letter: A, B, C, and D. Next, ask a multiple-choice question, and have students walk to the corner of the room that reflects which answer they think is correct. With their classmates who chose the same answer, the groups will discuss why they think they’re right.

To encourage debate, Finley suggests labeling the corners as Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree. Prompt students to walk to the corner that best reflects their view in response to a provocative content-specific statement. For example, in a civics classroom, the prompt could be, “Voting should be mandatory for all citizens.” 

23. Closing Activity: At the beginning of a lesson, high school teacher Kristie Johnson routinely selects 10 random students to hand a scrap of paper to. Each student who receives the paper will need to write down a comment about something discussed or a question that arises in class. “This gives me something to do if I wrap up early or something to start off the next class session,” she says. “It also allows students to ask questions anonymously as I shuffle the papers, and others can grab a sheet to add to the stack.”

24. Textbook Preview: Allow students to take a peek at what’s to come in your classroom by having them examine the next chapter of the textbook. After the scan, have the class break into small groups, each selecting a topic to dissect from their scan. Ask students to discuss whether their topic is “a controversial issue or if there is an ongoing debate on the topic,” Wedgwood says. 

Group members should record in their notebooks what they do and don’t know about their chosen topic, as well as what they’d like to learn. Toward the end of the period, invite groups to share their responses and pose any questions about the upcoming material to the class for discussion. 

25. Be the Teacher: Ask for a student volunteer to come to the board and “reteach what the class has just learned in two minutes or less,” Jenkins suggests. Other students can participate by raising their hands to ask the student-teacher a question or make a comment adding to what was discussed. Depending on the amount of time, you can have any number of students act as the teacher.

26. Engaging Texts: Consider keeping a list of compelling content-related texts for students to read—individually or in small groups—and discuss. Alternatively, provide audiobooks or audio files they can listen to. (Source: Todd Finley)

27. Category List: After splitting the class into teams, choose a category or topic that you’ve recently covered in class and write it on the board. Each team will cocreate a list of as many relevant things that fit into that category as they can within the set amount of time. For example, in an English classroom, if the category is “literary devices,” students would list things like simile, metaphor, foreshadowing, and irony. The team with the largest list wins. (Source: Ken Wedgwood)

28. VoBACKulary: Have a student volunteer stand in the front of the room with their back to the board and write a vocabulary word on the board. The standing student will call on their peers to give them clues and describe the chosen word until they correctly guess it. They can then choose the next person to come up and play. (Source: Ken Wedgwood)