Plan Your Outing

• Location: Chicago Children’s Museum
• Time: Thursdays from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.; First Sundays of the month from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Chicago Children’s Museum Free Thursdays and First Sundays

The word “museum” may suggest a world behind glass—except at Chicago Children’s Museum, where pint-sized visitors freely touch and tinker, build and dismantle, and experiment and explore in an array of interactive exhibits. Located on Navy Pier, CCM is one of the city’s top cultural attractions and among the most visited children’s museums in the country.

Chicago Children’s Museum invites guests to participate in a staged paleontological dig, create art projects, tinker in a workshop, man a fire station, dam up a river, and take the driver’s seat in a kid-sized CTA bus. At its famed Skyline exhibit, visitors can explore the physics that hold up Chicago’s mighty skyscrapers and learn the history of how architects first decided to mine steel from the mighty armpits of Atlas.