One of my favorite pastimes as a kid was drawing fantasy maps.  This is a really fun thing to do with younger kids because their imaginations come up with some of the funniest names for places, continents, oceans etc.  I kept a kid busy for hours working on one of these, and at the end it was really cool because he had made his own little world.

 What you will need:

• Pens
• Paper (I use graph paper or lined paper, but any paper will do)
• Colored Pencils (optional)

Step by step fantasy map-making.

1. With the pen, make about seven to eleven black dots randomly on the paper, make them about as big as a peppercorn (1/8th of an inch in diameter to get specific) Basically just dark enough that you can see them.
2. Those dots are now major cities on your continent(s).  Draw around them to create your coastlines, if you make a mistake, don’t do it over, you want your coastlines to be somewhat random too.  Try to keep some coastline near most of your cities, with maybe one or two in the middle of the continent.
3. Now draw a bunch of upside-down v’s on your continent.  These are your mountain ranges.  Lines zigzagging away from the mountains are rivers.
4. Put tiny dots near anything interesting on the map (a taller mountain, fork in the river, unusually pointy sections of coastline) these are villages.
5. Number the villages (See how high the kids can count).
6. On a separate sheet of paper, write the numbers down, and name each village.  (I usually would call one Buttsylvania, but then again I’m not the most creative person)  There should be enough that you run out of names before you run out of villages.  If you still have more names, feel free to put additional villages, or draw a few islands.
7. On the map itself, name the mountain ranges, rivers, oceans, continents, anything else you can think of.  Pick 5 or 6 cities and make them Capitals, then create borders with the colored pencils.

Now start asking questions, and encourage imaginative answers. 

Sample questions:

• How did the king afford that big stone castle?
• Why are there no cities on that part of the continent? 
• Is it smelly there? 
• Are there monsters?
• What makes the river turn and go back towards the mountain?

The kid I used to babysit for spent a lot of time on one map, but one of his friends just made a bunch of maps, and put them up all over his room.  Be creative, no two maps will be the same and they will all have an entertaining story to tell.