The Japanese islands have long been subject to intense earthquakes and their architecture evolved to combat them by using flexible wood supports. Wood can bend and flex where stone and brick cannot. Have the students construct simple buildings, a foot or two height, with Popsicle sticks or balsa wood with wood glue to hold it together. Then place the wood building on a shake table and gradually turn up the intensity to show the students how the building sways with the shocks instead of trying to resist them as a stone or brick building would.
A technique that has been developed along the Pacific rim (where seismic activity is at the greatest) is to place buildings' steel anchor beams on sliding metal plates. When the building is at rest, the weight is still transferred straight down but when an earthquake occurs, it is free to slide around a little bit. This can be replicated by placing a model building on a plate which in turn rests on a concave plate with some ball bearings. When the shake table is turned on the students will see that the top plate moves side to side but the building does not fall over.
As buildings have become higher, they are suffering more from a whip crack effect as their base and tops move in different directions. This has been combated with the use of pendulum weights like in a grandfather clock. The pendulum helps combat wide swings at the top of the building. In an earthquake, this would help prevent the tops of buildings from separating from the base. Have the students construct a simple three-foot-tall model and then hang a weight from a string tied to the top structural member. When the model is placed on the shake table, the students will see that the pendulum swings in the opposite direction of the shaking, canceling out a lot of the force.
Just as your car uses shock absorbers to absorb the undulations in the road, buildings can use shock absorbers to absorb undulations in the ground. Have the students place rubber blocks at the joints of the model building so that no structural member touches another member, only the rubber blocks. Run the model through the shake table to show how the rubber helps absorb the shocks without tearing the building apart.