Building an Ancient City

We are currently strudying Rome in SS 8.  We were talking about the geography of Rome and were going to talk about the important geographical features of Rome.  Before we had this discussion, I got the students to create their own ancient cities and to identify and describe the ten most important features of their city.  Initially I was going to have them draw them out, but then thought playdough would be great for this.  They did a great job and put a lot of thought into it.  Once they created it with playdough, they wrote down on paper what the important features were and why they were important.