Are you looking to find top kid friendly sites to visit on a road trip through Indiana? We visit Indiana almost every year and I’d love to share with you our favorite museums for families in this incredible state. These sites seriously impressed our family on our own road trips through Indiana, and we hope your family will love them too!
Sites in This Post Include:
Indianapolis Children’s Museum
Indianapolis Children’s Museum
Why You Should Go:
The Indianapolis Children’s Museum is the World’s Largest Children’s Museum! It is also considered one of the Best Children’s Museum in the United States! Here at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum there are five floors of interactive learning and fun that your kids are sure to love!
Indianapolis Children’s Museum Highlights:
Dinosphere is the largest display of real juvenile and family dinosaur fossils in the entire United States!
The lab here at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum actually got to name this dinosaur that they discovered!
In Dinosphere you can also see a real working Paleo Prep Lab and touch a real T. Rex femur!
Watching Real Paleontologists Work and touching a T-Rex bone!
Other fun adventures included, discovering a Mummy’s Tomb, exploring a pirate shipwreck and standing face to face with a Terra Cotta Warrior in the National Geographic Treasures of the Earth exhibit.
Putting Pieces together to recreate the Terra Cotta Warriors like the archaeologist did!
The highlight’s list continues with saying “Hello” to Bumblebee as you enter into the welcoming center, riding on a historic carousel and sitting in a real Indy racecar! We also loved watching North America’s largest Water Clock work its magic and put on a cool show at the top of the hour!
Meeting Bumblebee!
This museum is amazing and should definitely be on any family’s list of places to visit!
What Our Family Loved:
Everyone in our family absolutely loved the Indianapolis Children’s Museum! And we especially loved how they made learning fun on so many different topics through hundreds of interactive exhibits.
They put the sarcophagus back together in the Egyptian exhibit!
But aside from the amazing exhibits, one of my favorites at this museum was seeing the spectacular 43 foot tall Chihuly Glass sculpture! This magnificent sculpture contains 3,200 stunning pieces of blown glass that rises five stories high! This was my first time seeing a Chihuly sculpture and I was hooked!
(Since then I have sought out Chihuly sculptures at the Chihuly Museums in Seattle, WA, St. Petersburg, FL and a traveling exhibit at the Biltmore in NC. Unfortunately at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, I was so overcome by the glass sculpture’s beauty, that I forgot to take a picture of it! So if you haven’t seen these spectacular glass art sculptures yet, I highly recommend checking them out. )
With all of these amazing highlights, it’s easy to see why so many people rate the Indianapolis Children’s Museum as the Best Children’s Museums in the United States!
Suggested Duration:
Anywhere from 1/2 to a full day, depending on your interests and child’s attention span
Website: https://www.childrensmuseum.org/
Conner Prairie
in Fishers, Indiana
(30 min from the Indianapolis Children’s Museum)
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Making Candles -
Playing Games -
Weaving Cloth
Why You Should Go:
Conner Prairie is one of the Top Living History Museums in entire the United States! And they do a fantastic job at bringing history to life!
At Conner Prairie you will step back in time into the 1836 Prairietown where you can study in a one room school house, watch an 1800s tradesperson work, interact with 19th century villagers or learn a new trade yourself.
Going to school back in 1836
In another section of this enormous 800 acre museum you can immerse yourself into 1863 and experience what life was like in the southern Indiana town of Dupont shortly after a raid by General Morgan during the Civil War.
Dressing up like soldiers in the Civil War.
Museum Highlights:
The 1836 Prairietown and 1863 Civil War Journey are definitely the museums top highlights that shouldn’t be missed. Other highlights include being able to feed, pet, and play with farm animals inside a barn on a real working farm!
The “make and take” activities are also a highlight! These include candle dipping and basket weaving for ages 4+; baking “Cracknels”, metal casting a pewter pendant or using a hammer to make a copper bracelet for ages 8+; making cheese for ages 10+; and even learning how to load and fire a Civil War rifled musket (no live ammunition is used) for ages 14+.
What Our Family Loved:
Our family really enjoyed how all of the staff was in character the entire time. For example, when you enter the school house, the teacher was teaching an actual lesson that would have been taught to children in 1836. And when you talked to any of the villagers, every question was answered as if you were really living in 1836.
The interactive learning here in this museum is incredible!
Picking the seeds out of cotton – Matthew could have done this all day!
Here, our boys learned how to pick seeds out of cotton, pull the string on a spinning wheel and then use a small loom to make cloth. They also learned how to pump water from the ground and walk on stilts!
This complete immersion into another time was an absolutely amazing experience and would be a fantastic addition to any Indiana road trip!
Suggested Duration:
I did not realize how amazing this site would be when I planned our trip and so I scheduled for us to visit for ~3 hours. We did manage to see most of the museum in 3 hours but I would recommend at least 4 hours, especially if you really enjoy history or want to participate in the many “make and take” activities they have.
Website: https://www.connerprairie.org/
I hope you enjoyed reading about our favorite kid friendly sites to visit on a road trip through Indiana. This is a continuously growing list and as I come across new kid-friendly road trip stops in Indiana that our family thinks should make this list, I will definitely add them here!
Have a Great Road Trip in Indiana with Your “Traveling Feet!”
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