Challenge children to use their creativity and mapping skills to design and build a new town. Study a map of your town with the class and ask children to try to find the location of your school and their homes. Give each child a piece of poster board and ask him to draw out an imaginary town. Put out cardboard tubes, boxes and empty food containers. Each child can turn these items into buildings by painting and coloring them, then glueing them to the map.
Any type of puzzle teaches children about reasoning skills and trial and error. The day before doing this activity, create your own building using wooden blocks, plastic containers or any other items that are in your classroom. Take a picture of the building from every angle, then put everything away. Print out the pictures. Ask children to recreate the building exactly the same way you did. Create a series of buildings that gets more and more difficult to recreate, in order to challenge the class.
Children can experiment with different materials to discover which are strong enough to build with and which aren't. Put out boxes filled with twigs, craft sticks, toothpicks, wads of paper, cotton balls and any other craft materials you have on hand, along with tape and glue. Ask children to first predict what materials they can use to make a strong building and which ones they can't. Let children experiment with the materials to see how tall of a building they can create, then compare the results with their predictions.
Explain that columns can hold buildings up even if they don't look very strong. Show children an empty toilet paper roll and ask what they think will happen if someone steps on it. Stand the tube on its end and have a child step on it to demonstrate how it gets crushed. Give each child a tube and a tray or a cardboard box. Each child can place his tube on the tray, then fill it with salt or sand. When the child steps on the tube, it should be able to hold his weight. Let children experiment by mixing different materials or adding rubber bands to the outside of the tube to see what makes it the strongest.