I was talking with the amazing Amy Burvall earlier and she said something I thought was really profound.
“There is a lot of creativity in restraint.” – Amy Burvall
A classroom idea is to give students 4 constraints for their writing or project or activity and they have to be creative within those limits you set. To aid in this I, of course, created a spreadsheet template.
Link to the template: http://goo.gl/czVdsO
Notice at the bottom of the spreadsheet there are 3 tabs. The directions tab, the lists tab and the Randomizer tab.
After making a copy, on the lists tab create your lists of constraints. Retitle the headers to be the theme of the list. Back on the Randomizer tab a random thing will be chosen from each list. Refresh the page and new options will shown. Use this to assign each student to a different set of constraints. This can also be used for story dice or anything else that you would like to randomize 4 things with. Enjoy!