The first activity we did to get students to push their thought boundaries was to get students to brainstorm about the word love. The first thoughts that come to mind are words that describe the commercial love that is advertised for Valentine's day. If you ask for students to think harder about love they start to move away from flowers and chocolates, and start to think about the deeper and more insightful parts of what love is.
The next part of the activity, got students to think further about being more ridiculous. The students were given a sentence with two blanks in it, and they were required to fill it in. The words should not be interrelated. The more words the students can come up with, the better and sillier the sentence became.
The final part of this activity was through the use of questions that connects ideas. The students would be asked to answer any or all of the questions provided, by thinking outside of the box. Perhaps not thinking about the most obvious relation between the two ideas. This activity gets students' creativity flowing and it was very interesting to see how each group of students had very different connections between the words, once people moved past their very first idea.