Eight to twelve is a good age for going out together: old enough to sit through a full musical or a museum workshop, still young enough to want you along. This list pulls together the shows, art weekends and evening festivals that suit that age, with the best fit first. Plans come and go through the season, so check back before the weekend.
Two hands-on art workshops for kids, part of Vivante, an art festival celebrating nature and living things. In the first, artist Sophie Della Corte helps kids imagine and design their own sheet of temporary flash tattoos to take home.
In the second, Studio Pekelo introduces cyanotype, a printing technique known for its shades of blue, and kids compose their own enchanted forest inspired by plant shapes.
On stage, illustrator Laetitia Coryn draws a Louvre masterpiece live while storyteller Nicolas Lafitte tells its story and musician Axl-s plays along, with the audience in on the game. Each episode picks one painting, sculpture or object from the collection and digs into who made it and why.
It's a funny, fast way into a museum that can feel overwhelming with kids.
Kids step into the shoes of a 13th-century apprentice knight in this game-visit through the museum's Ancient Arms and Armor department. Using challenges and objects from the collection, they find out how a knight trained and what his daily life looked like.
Pass the tests and the visit ends with a dubbing. It is a playful way for kids to discover the museum.
Prizoners runs two wizard-themed escape rooms built for kids' birthday parties. Kids arrive as apprentice alchemists: they get a wizard name, put on a cape and drink a potion, then solve puzzles as a team with a game host to recover stolen elixirs, finishing by mixing their own potion.
Afterward the group has a private room for cake and presents, and each kid goes home with a wizard diploma.
Kids invent one comic story as a group with comics writer Judith Peignen. Everyone pitches an idea and votes at each step of the plot.
Then each child draws the story their own way and goes home with their own comic page. It suits kids who like drawing and making up stories, and who are comfortable sharing ideas in French.
Six young actors sing, dance and tap their way through Dickens's story of the orphan who falls in with Fagin's gang of pickpockets in London's back streets. They tell it like 19th-century street hawkers, swapping between Oliver, Nancy, Bill Sikes, Fagin and the Artful Dodger. Expect laughs and a few sad scenes. The show was nominated for a 2026 Molière, France's top theater award, for best young-audience production.
Slava's Snowshow is the show by Russian clown Slava Polunin and his troupe, a hit for more than 30 years. It draws on Chaplin, Fellini and the great slapstick acts.
Clowns in chick yellow and fir green, with rubbery bodies, fill a dreamlike, absurd world with gags. It suits kids who like silly physical comedy and can enjoy a poetic moment too.
Circo Infinito is a contemporary circus show where three performers from the Académie Fratellini mix acrobatics, visual poetry and live music on a set of sails and light.
The organizer pitches it as a feel-good show for all audiences, built around the strength of the group. It runs on movement and music, not words, so kids need no French. It suits school-age kids who can sit through a theater show.
Phia Ménard and Cie Non Nova build puppets out of plastic, then bring them to life with puppeteers' hands and the air from fans. Bodies, objects and landscapes appear, twirl and change shape in a ballet.
A good fit for kids drawn to dance and visual theater; less so for those who want a plot spelled out.
Terre de Rêves is a story told in music, the first young-audience concert of the Saison musicale des Invalides. It follows a shipwrecked Irishman who crosses huge landscapes with the Anishinaabe people, all the way to the Great Lakes.
Banjo, mandolin, double bass and violin carry the tunes, with the story narrated in French. It suits kids who can follow a spoken story and sit through a concert.
Atelier Terres des Batignolles is a ceramics studio near La Fourche, run by sculptor and ceramicist Nadège with a small team of teachers. For children, it hosts clay-modeling birthday parties around one big shared worktable, in a workshop stocked with tools, slips and glazes.
The weekly courses are for adults, so this is a place to book a party, not to drop in with kids.
Moon & Sugar runs baking birthday parties at La petite cuisine de Sandrine, a kitchen studio. The birthday kid and friends bake and decorate their own treats: cupcakes in a theme they choose (unicorns, animals, Halloween, Christmas), decorated shortbread, choux or layer cakes.
A specialized educator who is a trained pastry chef leads. Kids go home with their bakes and a recipe card. Private parties only, no drop-in classes.
Disney's stage version of The Lion King, sung and spoken in French, with the songs kids know as "L'Histoire de la Vie" and "Il vit en toi". The draw for kids is the animals: actors in lion masks, and puppet giraffes, gazelles and a cheetah crossing the savanna on stage.
The story follows the film, Scar included, and the theater warns that some scenes can frighten younger children.
OVO is Cirque du Soleil's insect show. A busy colony eats, flutters and courts across the stage, a ladybug catches the eye of an odd newcomer, and a mysterious egg sets the story going.
Kids get big acrobatics, bright costumes and a simple story to follow. It suits kids who can sit through a long arena show; very young or sound-sensitive kids may find it a lot.
Inside a paper cave, a man finds a mysterious wall, a child calls to him, and animals spring to life by firelight. Philippe Beau, one of the few professional hand-shadow artists, performs alongside magic effects and projected drawings by Compagnie 14:20.
A quiet, poetic piece about prehistoric cave art, narrated in French. It suits kids happy to sit in the dark and watch; restless ones may struggle.
Two 17th-century houses on Rue Cortot tell the story of Montmartre's artists, and one holds the rebuilt studio-apartment where Suzanne Valadon and Maurice Utrillo lived and painted. Around them, the terraced Renoir Gardens, where Renoir painted The Swing, step down to the Clos Montmartre vineyard.
A free game booklet from the front desk turns the permanent collection into a hunt for kids. Toddlers will mostly enjoy the garden.
The Panthéon is a domed 18th-century monument on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, designed by the architect Soufflot. Under the dome, Foucault's pendulum swings on a 67-meter wire, its path slowly shifting as the Earth turns.
Below the nave, the crypt holds the tombs of Victor Hugo, Marie Curie and other figures France chose to honor. Best for school-age kids curious about science or history.
Thoiry Lumières Sauvages is a night walk of nearly 3 km through the park's paths, gardens and maze, lit by more than 3,000 handmade silk sculptures of giant animals, plants and creatures.
This edition, Sur les traces de Pachamama, follows an explorer from the ocean floor to Greenland, Mongolia, India and Peru. A new clue appears at each stop, and the ending stays secret until the last one.
An exhibition that tells the history of the post through fairy tales. The entrance hall has an old stagecoach pulled by postal drones, and the way in is through an ogre's wide-open mouth. Inside, families cross a life-size forest that smells of moss.
Among the 500-plus objects: copies of Peau d'Âne's dresses and a braid of postal hair over two meters tall, a nod to Rapunzel.
Le Noël des Siècles turns the Château de Champs-sur-Marne into a walk-through Christmas tale mixing theater, dance and history. Families follow Ilda through the rooms in 1907, until the Nisse, a genie called up with a bell and a magic formula, sends everyone through three Christmases across time.
Close to 100 volunteers fill the rooms in costume. It suits kids who like dress-up and a story they can walk inside.
Essentiel is the new show from Cirque Arlette Gruss, one of France's traditional family circuses, set up in a heated big top on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes. Expect balancing acts, aerial hoops, juggling, horses, motorbikes and the clown Bellini, all played to a live orchestra.
It suits kids who can sit through a long show and like their circus classic rather than experimental.
A night visit of Versailles staged as a show. After the crowds leave, families walk the Grand Apartments while baroque musicians, singers, dancers and fencers perform room by room, with a dance in the Hall of Mirrors.
This year's theme is Marie-Antoinette and fashion, and the walk ends in the Gallery of Battles with a baroque Santa. It suits kids who can stay on their feet the whole way.
The royal palace south of Paris dresses up for the holidays. A Christmas show plays most days of the break, and a festive table is laid in the Salle des Gardes with royal and imperial china from the collections, right on the visit route.
Concerts and family tours round out the program. It suits school-age kids happy to walk a long palace circuit.
The classical Nutcracker ballet, set to Tchaikovsky's score, is back after last season's run. Clara gets a nutcracker as a Christmas Eve present, and during the night the toy comes to life and takes her into a world of fantasy characters.
It suits kids who already like dance or music and can sit through a long show, plus any grown-up who loves classical ballet.
France's postal museum fills three floors by Gare Montparnasse with postal vehicles, carrier uniforms, sorting gear and a panorama of French stamps from the first issues to today.
Kids pick up a free game booklet or a multimedia guide with a family trail at the front desk, then hunt for clues through the rooms. Storytelling visits and printmaking workshops add a hands-on side.
The museum of the Paris Mint sits inside a working factory on the Seine. Kids look onto the engraving and foundry workshops, often catch a live engraving demonstration, and try striking coins at interactive stations.
The route is built for touch, smell and sound as well as looking, and the collection runs to 170,000 coins, medals, tools and old minting machines.
Ceramoka is a paint-your-own ceramics studio with a small café near Porte de Saint-Cloud. Kids pick a white earthenware piece off the shelves, such as a mug, plate or bowl, and paint it with non-toxic colors. Nobody needs to know how to draw: staff give a short briefing, and stencils and templates are on hand. The studio then glazes the piece and fires it in its kiln.
Hapik is a fun-climbing hall inside the Centre sportif et culturel Camille Muffat. The walls are colorful themed challenges rather than standard routes, each with an auto-belay rope, so kids climb on their own with no experience.
There is also an indoor ropes course in via ferrata style, a leap-of-faith jump, bamboo poles and an interactive climbing game, plus a snack bar.
Choco-Story tells 4,000 years of cocoa history, from the Maya to the modern chocolate bar, through a collection of about a thousand objects in three sections.
A chocolatier makes chocolate live in front of visitors, and the tastings along the route are all you can eat. Kids under 12 follow the tour with a game booklet, and the chocolate art area includes a 3-meter sculpture made from 200kg of chocolate.
The Musée Rodin fills the Hôtel Biron mansion and the sculpture garden around it. Indoors are marble and plaster works such as The Kiss, plus pieces by Camille Claudel.
Outside, kids can circle The Thinker, look up at the crowded figures of The Gates of Hell and walk among The Burghers of Calais, with a café set in the middle of the garden.
Musée Carnavalet is the city's history museum, running from prehistoric oak dugout canoes to the 20th century. For kids, the standouts are two rooms of old shop signs, the Gallo-Roman finds, and the Revolution rooms with a heater shaped like the Bastille and Marie Antoinette's slipper.
Later rooms hold Mucha's Art Nouveau jewelry shop and Proust's bedroom, and the gardens are open for a snack break.
The Musée de l'Armée fills the Hôtel des Invalides with French military history, from medieval suits of armor and samurai gear to the Napoleonic era and both world wars. Cannons line the main courtyard, and Napoleon's tomb sits under the golden Dôme. The Plans-Reliefs museum shows giant scale models of fortified towns.
Kids who like knights and battles get the most from it; the world war galleries suit older children.
The Musée de l'Homme tells the story of our species in a 2,500 m² gallery that looks out over the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. Kids come face to face with Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon skulls, a Peruvian mummy and a painted Senegalese bus, listen at a wall of world languages, and try sensory stations along the way.
The Paris Sewer Museum sits inside working sewer tunnels under the Pont de l'Alma. An elevator takes visitors down to a 500-meter walk through real galleries, past the machinery sewer workers use to clear the tunnels, scale models, and displays on how the city cleans its water.
Kids who like machines, pipes and how things work get the most out of it. Expect some smells and damp air.
The national music museum holds nearly 9,000 instruments and artworks, laid out from the late 1500s to today: Stradivari violins, an octobass, Theremin and Hammond electronics, a gallery of Fender and Gibson electric guitars, and instruments from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. A free video guide lets kids see and hear the instruments played, and musicians give short live performances in the galleries every day.
Around 3,500 objects from Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas line one long circuit, set on either side of a central aisle shaped like a river. Themed nooks off the path focus on one region or kind of work, and displays rotate often. Outside, a garden by the Seine opens earlier and closes later than the museum. Suits kids who like hunting for faces in carved masks.
Musée de la Magie fills 16th-century vaulted cellars in the Marais with the history of conjuring: animated automata, optical illusions, hand-cranked mutoscopes, posters and the props of famous magicians.
Guides lead most rooms and tell the stories behind the pieces; the automata room is self-guided. Entry includes a live close-up magic show, and the shop at the center sells books and beginner tricks.
Volte is this season's new show at the Cirque d'Hiver, the 1852 circus building run by the Bouglione family. It is classic ring circus: a prize-winning flying trapeze troupe, slackline, diabolo, breakdancers, juggling, clowns and a horse-and-pony act, all led by Monsieur Loyal and a live orchestra.
It suits kids old enough to sit through a full-length show, and grandparents who remember the circus this way.
Lire en Délire is a children's book festival in the Belleville and Fontaine-au-Roi neighborhood, now in its 17th edition. Local bookshops, theaters, libraries and community centers host author signings, writing and pop-up book workshops, kids' plays, exhibitions and readings.
It ends with a book fair where kids meet authors and illustrators, join creative workshops and hear stories read aloud.
Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary art center by the Seine, runs hands-on art workshops in the hamo, its studio space. Kids look at the current exhibitions, then make something: younger ones rebuild mountains out of clothes or weave a spider's house, older ones make a bandit's bandana or a color-filter spyglass. In the family workshop, everyone builds a shelter for a home's unseen neighbors, from spiders to hydrangeas.
Patins en Folie is an open-air ice rink in Parc André Citroën, billed as the city's largest. Mornings suit beginners and families, with a separate area for small children and lessons from skating pros.
In the evening, music and lighting turn the ice into a dance floor for teens and adults. A food village serves hot chocolate, waffles and seasonal dishes between laps.
A night walk through part of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, lit by nearly 2,000 handmade lanterns: tigers, elephants, temples, deities and festival scenes from India, with music along the route. Kids see something new every few steps, from a family of tigers to a painted elephant. It ends in a food court serving Indian dishes. This is the park's fourth lantern festival, after China and Japan.
Odyssée is the new show from Cirque Phénix, performed by 40 acrobats from Les Étoiles du Cirque de Pékin. Expect plate spinning, hoop diving, foot juggling and balancing acts, with bold costumes, big sets and loud, modern music.
There are no animals, no ringmaster and no classic clowns, so it suits kids who want nonstop skill. It is long and loud for preschoolers.
The Musée d'Orsay is turning 40, and it is celebrating with a festive weekend of music and shows for families, on top of the usual galleries.
Kids can watch a new show based on France Inter's hit podcast Les Fabuleuses histoires du doudou, catch Aldebert and his Enfantillages in concert, hear the Maîtrise populaire de l'Opéra-Comique, and join singing and dance workshops. Best for kids who follow French.
For one weekend the medieval walled town of Provins, a UNESCO World Heritage site, becomes an open-air stage. Troubadours, jugglers and street performers work the crowds, jousts and games fill the squares, and craftspeople and traders line the lanes. Thousands of visitors come in costume.
It suits kids who love knights and castles, and families happy to spend a day in a big crowd.
France's national open-gardens weekend, run by the Ministry of Culture. Public parks, private estates and botanical gardens open their gates, some of them only for this weekend. Families find guided tours, workshops, walks and the odd concert among the flower beds.
The 2027 theme is lawns, meadows and grasslands. It suits kids who like to look closely at plants and bugs, less so ones who need a playground.
France's national day opens with a military parade down the Champs-Élysées, from the Arc de Triomphe toward Place de la Concorde. Kids watch jets trail blue, white and red smoke overhead, then helicopters, marching troops, armored vehicles and the mounted Republican Guard.
It suits kids who can handle a long wait in a big crowd and loud flyovers. Toddlers and noise-sensitive kids may do better watching the jets from farther away.
For one weekend a year, France opens buildings that are usually closed to the public: government ministries, courts, military sites, churches, artisan workshops and private mansions. In Paris that means a long list of doors at once, with guided tours, craft demonstrations, small plays and concerts alongside.
Kids get to walk into rooms most adults never see, and many sites run games or workshops just for them.
Canauxrama runs narrated boat trips along the Canal Saint-Martin, between Bassin de la Villette and Port de l'Arsenal by Bastille. Kids watch the boat work through 8 locks, pass 2 swing bridges and the Crimée lift bridge, then glide through the vault beneath Bastille, lit by skylights. Guides tell stories of Napoleon and old Paris along the way. The full canal trip runs one way, so plan the ride back.
LudoJardin is the fenced playground inside the Jardin du Luxembourg, built around a nature theme with wooden decks and paths. Kids cross hanging bridges, find their way through a labyrinth, fly down a zip line and take the slides.
Parents stay inside with their children. The garden's pony rides, carousel, puppet theater and toy sailboats on the pond are a short walk away.
The Musée des Arts Décoratifs fills a wing of the Louvre palace with eight centuries of design: furniture, everyday objects, toys and fashion, around 6,000 pieces across seven floors.
Workshops pair a gallery visit with a hands-on project, some for kids alone and some for families. It suits kids who like clothes and making things; toddlers who need to run will find it slow.
Studio des Ursulines is a single-screen cinema near the Luxembourg Gardens, open since 1926 and the first art-house cinema in France. Since 2003 it has programmed mainly for young audiences: animated features, short-film programs, ciné-concerts with live music, previews and festivals such as Mon Premier Festival for the youngest. Kids' films carry a starting age, many from 3 or 4, and some screenings come with workshops or meet-the-filmmaker talks.
Batobus is a hop-on hop-off boat service on the Seine, with nine stops between the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin des Plantes, including the Louvre, Notre-Dame and the Musée d'Orsay. The trimarans are glassed in and heated, with an open-air deck at the back.
A full loop takes about 1 hour 45 minutes, so kids can ride the river between sights instead of walking, or stay aboard the whole way.
Bateaux-Mouches runs commentated sightseeing cruises on the Seine from the Pont de l'Alma, on the right bank. The big passenger boats pass the Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, the Conciergerie and Notre-Dame, then return to the same pier without stops.
Kids can tick off the landmarks as they slide by. The company also runs brunch, lunch and dinner cruises.
The navy and seafaring museum in the Palais de Chaillot shows more than 1,000 objects across themed galleries. Kids walk into a life-size ship's prow under a dome film of the sea, step inside a giant wave in the shipwrecks room, and study ship models nearly 5 meters long, gilded figureheads, compasses and lighthouse lenses.
A family trail marked with flags runs through the route.
The Cité fills part of the Palais de Chaillot with full-size plaster casts of French cathedral portals and statues, full-size copies of medieval wall paintings, and a modern architecture gallery of models, drawings and building fragments. Kids can walk right up to carved saints and doorways usually seen high on a facade.
Weekends and school holidays bring family tours and hands-on workshops.
A private museum of fairground rides, automatons and show objects from the 19th and early 20th centuries, set in Bercy's old wine pavilions. Guides who double as performers lead every visit, start up the musical automatons and invite visitors onto century-old carousels, including a merry-go-round turned by pedaling bicycles.
The halls include a Belle Epoque funfair and a little Venice with its own lagoon.
The Musée des Arts et Métiers holds more than 2,400 inventions across seven collections, from scientific instruments to transport. The standout room is the former church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, where early planes hang over vintage cars and Foucault's pendulum swings in the nave.
Kids can also find Bartholdi's original model of the Statue of Liberty and Pascal's mechanical calculator, and museum staff run demonstrations in the galleries.
The Gruss family has put on horse shows since 1974. This season's show is an equestrian musical with original music, mixing riding stunts, aerial acts, tightrope and comic sketches, with a live orchestra and seats all around the ring.
Before the show there's a meal with live music, and afterward the artists come out to chat. It suits horse-mad kids and anyone happy to sit through a long show.
The biggest Christmas market in the Paris region fills the La Défense esplanade with more than 350 wooden chalets. Kids come for the ice rink, the carousels, the costumed parades and a visit to Santa and Mrs. Claus. At the elves' workshop in Santa's house, younger ones make their own Christmas decorations to take home. Grown-ups get treats and gift shopping among the office towers.
The Magie de Noël is the first Christmas market to open in France: 95 wooden chalets and rides spread over a hectare of the Tuileries Garden.
Kids can go down the giant slide, ride Santa's little train and the Christmas carousel, skate on a 250 m² rink and meet Santa in his chalet. Grown-ups browse craft gifts from makers across France.
La Magie de Noël fills a corner of the Jardin des Tuileries, between the Louvre and Place de la Concorde, with 95 wooden chalets and rides. Most chalets sell goods made in France.
Kids come for the fairground: a giant slide, hook-a-duck, Santa's little train and treasure hunts for small ones, bumper cars, flying chairs and a small roller coaster for older ones, with the Grande Roue Ferris wheel overhead.
Each winter the nave of the Grand Palais becomes an indoor ice rink, billed as the largest in the world, under the building's famous glass and steel roof. Kids skate on the main rink or in a separate area kept just for children.
Between laps, the mountain-style restaurant serves crêpes, waffles and hot chocolate. Evening sessions run late and suit teens and adults more than young kids.
France's biggest farm show fills the Porte de Versailles halls with cows, sheep, goats, pigs, horses and donkeys, brought in by breeders from across the country. Kids can get close to the animals, watch the judging in the show rings and taste food from every French region and overseas territory.
It suits animal-mad kids of any age. Expect big crowds, especially at weekends.
Marché Bastille is an open-air street market that runs along Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, from rue Amelot to rue Saint-Sabin, a short walk from Place de la Bastille. Stalls of fruit, vegetables and other fresh food line the route, so kids can walk the aisles, point out what they want to try and help pick lunch.
It suits an unhurried morning walk with a stroller and a shopping bag.
Marché d'Aligre is a street market along rue d'Aligre, with food stalls lining both sides. In the middle, on place d'Aligre, sits Marché Beauvau, a covered market hall built in 1843 and listed as a historic monument.
Kids can help pick fruit and vegetables at the stalls, then peek inside the old hall.
Georges-Vallerey is the 50-meter pool built for the 1924 Paris Olympics, now under a wooden roof that slides open in good weather. A movable wall can split it into two 25-meter pools, and a moving floor sets the depth from 0.9 to 2.15 meters, so some days have a shallow end. It suits kids who can swim or are learning; there is no separate toddler pool.
Bowling Mouffetard has eight bowling lanes plus billiard tables, on Rue Mouffetard, the old market street of the Latin Quarter. Shoes and balls come with each game, and socks are required (disposable ones are handed out).
Weekend mornings and weekday afternoons draw families. Evenings, especially Friday to Sunday, turn into a grown-up night out with no bookings taken.
An 800 m² ice rink under a glass roof, inside the Espace Sportif Pailleron a few streets from the Buttes-Chaumont park. Most of its ice time goes to public sessions rather than clubs, with music playing over the ice.
A rest area sits beside the rink, and a walkway and stands around it let parents watch from off the ice. Skates and helmets are for hire at the desk.
A public pool built on a barge moored on the Seine, beside the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand. The 25-meter pool sits under a glass roof that opens in summer, when a 500 m² sun deck with views of the river boats opens too.
It suits kids who swim confidently: there is no separate shallow pool for toddlers.
Smile World Bercy 2 fills 4,000 m² on the top floor of the Bercy 2 shopping center with an indoor karting track, a trampoline park, a laser game maze, arcade games and private karaoke rooms. It is the only Smile World with karting and trampolines.
Kids can book one activity or combine a few, and a bar serves pizzas and sharing boards between sessions.
The Puces de Saint-Ouen is the world's largest cluster of antique and secondhand dealers, spread over seven hectares just past the northern edge of Paris. Eleven covered markets, among them Vernaison, Paul Bert Serpette and Dauphine, sit alongside five shopping streets and sidewalk stalls. Kids who like a treasure hunt can wander narrow alleys packed with old furniture, paintings, crystal and vintage clothes.
Place du Tertre is the old village square at the top of Montmartre, a few streets from the Sacré-Cœur basilica. Painters set up easels here every day, and portrait artists sketch visitors, kids included, while families watch.
Picasso, Modigliani and Utrillo lived nearby in the early 1900s. The Montmartre funicular climbs from the foot of the hill to Sacré-Cœur, skipping the Rue Foyatier stairs.
A Gothic royal chapel from the 1240s, tucked inside the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité. The lower chapel has a low, painted blue-and-gold vault. A narrow spiral staircase leads to the upper chapel, where walls of stained glass hold 1,113 scenes from the Bible.
Kids who like spotting details can hunt for kings, animals and battles. Sunny days light the glass best.
The Arc de Triomphe stands at the top of the Champs-Élysées, in the middle of Place de l'Étoile. Kids climb 284 steps inside the arch to a rooftop terrace that looks down the avenues to the Eiffel Tower.
Under the arch are the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and its flame, framed by huge sculpted groups on the pillars. The climb suits kids who can handle a long staircase.
The Natural History Museum's zoo sits on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes, under its landmark Grand Rocher. Over 3,000 animals live in five biozones: Africa, Patagonia, Europe, Amazon-Guyana and Madagascar.
Kids watch giraffes and white rhinos on the African plain, penguins and sea lions in Patagonia, and lemurs up close in Madagascar. A tropical greenhouse with manatees makes a warm stop on a cold day.
Car-free stretches of the Seine's banks, 4.5 km on the right bank and 2.5 km on the left, form a 10-hectare riverside park. Kids get a 40-meter balance trail of stumps and logs from Paris trees, and a docks-themed play corner with a pontoon, a small boat and a crate maze.
The paths double as a cycle route where walkers have priority, and about fifteen cafés and barges line the way.
Also called the Promenade Plantée, this 4.5 km walkway follows an old railway line from Bastille toward the Bois de Vincennes. One stretch runs on a viaduct above Avenue Daumesnil at treetop height, then the path drops through tunnels and cuttings into the Reuilly gardens.
The arches below hold the Viaduc des Arts, where some craftspeople work in glass-front workshops. It suits a long stroller walk or a slow family ramble.
Parc de Belleville covers a steep hillside, with the Willy Ronis belvedere at the top looking out over the rooftops of Paris. A cascading fountain over 100 meters long runs down the slope between stairs, pergolas and terraced lawns.
Kids head for the playground, the ping-pong tables and the foosball table, and can spot the small vineyard, replanted in 1992 where monks once made wine.
The world's largest tethered balloon rises 150 meters above Parc André Citroën on a steel cable, carrying up to 30 passengers for a flight of about 10 minutes. It runs on helium and an electric winch, so the ride is silent, with a 360-degree view over the Seine and the Eiffel Tower.
Since 2013 it has also worked as a flying lab that measures the city's air pollution.
Parc André-Citroën sits on the site of the old Citroën car factory beside the Seine. A long central lawn runs down to a canal, renovated in 2024 with shallow streams, floating gardens and geyser jets near the river.
Kids run through the fountain jets on hot days, then head to the playground, the merry-go-rounds or the ping-pong tables. Glass greenhouses and a series of themed gardens round it out.
Opened in 1794, the Ménagerie is one of the oldest zoos in the world, set inside the Jardin des Plantes. It keeps about 500 animals from 122 species, mostly small and medium-sized: red pandas, snow leopards, orangutans, Seychelles tortoises, Malayan tapirs and keas.
The listed buildings are part of the visit, from the 1805 Bear Pits to the art deco Vivarium, the Singerie and the Great Aviary.
The only amusement park inside the Paris city limits, set at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Around 45 rides run from a dragon roller coaster and flying swings to a pirate ship, a mirror maze and a Guignol puppet theater.
The farm side has dwarf goats, alpacas, Ouessant sheep and some 450 birds, and toddlers get a paddling pool and a bear-themed maze.
A former 1835 steel foundry where 140 projectors cover the walls of a 1,500 m² hall with moving artworks set to music. Visitors walk through the images, then see them multiplied in a mirror tower.
In the Atelier des Enfants, kids color a dinosaur or Renaissance template, scan it, and watch their drawing come to life on the wall. The main show changes through the year.
Frank Gehry's building looks like a ship under twelve glass sails, set at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Inside, 11 galleries hold modern and contemporary art shows that change through the year.
For kids, the outside is half the visit: stairs climb to roof terraces with views over the trees, and a water basin runs along the base, beside Olafur Eliasson's glowing column corridor, Inside the Horizon.
Aquarium de Paris sits under the Trocadéro gardens, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. Around 50 tanks hold some 13,500 fish and invertebrates from French seas, including 35 sharks and 400 coral colonies. The jellyfish gallery has 24 tanks with species that rotate.
Talks and shows during the day come with entry. The route slopes gently with no stairs, so strollers go all the way around.
A wax museum on the Grands Boulevards where kids pose next to life-size figures of footballers, singers and cartoon heroes like Paw Patrol, Miraculous and the Little Prince.
A walk-through history section runs from the Chauvet cave to Louis XIV's court and Napoleon, and there's a new One Piece area. Many figures are French TV stars, so visiting kids may know mostly the athletes and cartoons.
The Musée d'Orsay fills a former railway station, built 1898 to 1900 on the Left Bank of the Seine. Under the glass roof of the old train hall, a long central nave is lined with sculptures, and a gilded station clock hangs at one end.
The galleries hold Impressionist paintings kids may know from books: Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône and Monet's Blue Water Lilies.
The Louvre is a former royal palace with about 35,000 works on display, from Egyptian antiquities to the Mona Lisa. It is huge and tiring for kids, so families do best picking one wing and keeping the visit short.
The Studio, on the ground floor of the Richelieu wing, has drawing activities, board games, a reading nook and a baby space with a bottle warmer and nursing chair.
France's national aviation museum fills 12 halls and an outdoor tarmac at Le Bourget airport with more than 100 aircraft, from the first flying machines and a Spitfire to two Concordes.
Kids can walk inside a Boeing 747, play pilot or astronaut at Planète Pilote's 40 hands-on stations, catch a planetarium show, and climb the restored 1953 control tower for a view over the runways.
A long 1898 hall in the Jardin des Plantes, part of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. The ground floor holds a herd of vertebrate skeletons, from fish and birds to a whale, lined up to show how bones adapt to the way an animal lives.
Upstairs, dinosaur skeletons, mammoths and fossils fill the galleries. It suits kids who love bones and big animals more than hands-on play.
A two-part family workshop at the Louvre. It starts in the Near Eastern Antiquities galleries, looking closely at a mysterious ancient statuette and uncovering a few of its secrets.
Then comes the making: kids fold, twist and shape clay into a figurine of their own. It's a family session, so parents join in and should expect clay on their hands too.
Europe's biggest children's book fair fills Paris Montreuil Expo with close to 400 publishers, from picture books and comics to teen fiction and kids' magazines.
Kids browse the stands, get books signed by authors and illustrators, and drop into readings, talks, workshops and an exhibition on this year's theme, "Aux frontières du réel". It suits young readers of every age, from board books to YA.
L'Heure Joyeuse opened in 1924 as the first children's library in Paris. Its two floors hold a children's space and a teen and adult space, with about 25,000 books, CDs, DVDs and board games on open shelves.
Kids can borrow kamishibai paper-theater sets, play board games, use computers set aside for young readers, and join storytimes, workshops, film screenings and shows.
Aquaboulevard is a big indoor water park at Balard, with the water kept at 29°C all year. Inside are two wave pools, 11 slides, rivers with a current, geysers, water mushrooms and jacuzzis.
In summer, outdoor pools and a 4,000 m² sand beach open too. A Gaumont cinema, a McDonald's and a Decathlon share the same complex.
The largest bouldering and roped-climbing gym in the capital, spread over 4,000 m². Kids can boulder on walls up to 4 meters high over thick mats with no harness, or tie in on roped walls around 10 meters high.
Instructors run a climbing school, family sessions and school-holiday programs. A café-bar serves light meals, and a separate studio hosts yoga.
A bouldering gym at the foot of Montmartre, a few steps from Montmartre Cemetery, with more than 12 problems at each grade and routes reset all the time. Kids from 3 to 12 get their own area of colorful walls, while teens climb the adult sectors.
Classes, school-holiday camps and climbing birthday parties run year-round, and the Cantine restaurant on site serves seasonal dishes with vegetarian options.
Notre-Dame is the Gothic cathedral on the Île de la Cité, built between 1163 and 1345 and reopened in December 2024 after the 2019 fire. Inside, kids can look up at the restored stone vaults and the big rose windows.
A separate climb up the south tower runs 424 steps past the gargoyles, which were built as rain spouts, to views across Paris from 69 meters up.
Sacré-Cœur sits on top of the Montmartre hill, and the steps and lawns below its white domes are where families stop to look out over the rooftops. Inside, kids can hunt for the huge mosaic of Christ above the choir.
The bigger adventure is the dome: 280 steps up a narrow staircase, past the basilica roofs, to a walkway with a 360-degree view of Paris and its monuments.
A long, narrow garden on the Left Bank of the Seine, running along Quai Saint-Bernard between Pont de Sully and Place Valhubert. Kids get a playground, a skate park, ping-pong tables, a soccer pitch and street workout bars, with sculptures set along the riverside paths.
Jardin d'Éole is a long, narrow park built on former rail land beside the tracks, on the edge of the 18th and 19th arrondissements. Its 4-plus hectares hold toddler playgrounds, a basketball court, ping-pong tables, a tennis practice wall and space for ball games, along with a big meadow, a planted canal and a gravel garden. One of its eight drinking fountains pours sparkling water.
Parc Floral is a 30-hectare botanical park in the Bois de Vincennes, laid out as themed gardens, an oak grove and pavilions of bonsai, ferns and Jurassic plants.
For kids there is a playground with sandboxes and swings, a Guignol puppet theater, minigolf, a treetop ropes course, an escape game and four-wheel pedal bikes to rent. On warm days the open-air stage hosts Pestacles, a children's music festival.
The Grande Galerie de l'Évolution is the Natural History Museum's main hall at the Jardin des Plantes, an 1889 iron-and-glass nave holding about 7,000 specimens. Downstairs, whales and a giant squid loom over sea life. Upstairs, an elephant leads a parade of savannah animals, and the lights and soundtrack run from dawn to a passing storm. A room of threatened and extinct species holds a giant panda and a Tasmanian tiger.
The food hall of Le Bon Marché department store, stocked with groceries from France and around the world. Kids can browse shelves of chocolate, a pastry counter, a blue-tiled fish counter, and stacks of fruit and miniature vegetables.
It is a shop, not a play space, so it suits kids who like looking at food more than running around.
Seven Squares is a 5,000m² indoor leisure center inside the Boom Boom Villette mall, next to the Cité des Sciences. Its pirate-themed soft play, L'Île de Tortuga, has a separate toddler area with ball pits and foam blocks, and a big-kid maze of slides, tunnels, a pirate ship and a kart track.
Older kids can move on to the trampoline park, bowling, laser game, VR and the arcade.
La Gaîté Lyrique is a City of Paris cultural center in a listed 19th-century theater. The ground floor and first floor are open to wander, with a café-bar, artist exhibitions and a workshop space.
Kids' programs include Contes à paillettes storytelling one Sunday a month and the Les Grands Yeux children's festival. Teens get the Centre Pompidou's Studio 13/16, a 400 m² creative lab on level 1.
A large city library set in the historic Saint-Lazare enclosure, behind Square Alban Satragne. The children's section holds about 30,000 books, comics, audiobooks, CDs and DVDs, with a kids' comics corner, board games and video games.
It also houses the Heure Joyeuse collection, children's books from the 16th century to today, and a 70m² gallery that runs three exhibitions a year.
Arkose Chevaleret is a bouldering gym with more than 1,000 m² of short walls climbed without ropes over thick mats, plus a warm-up area and a sauna. Routes are reset continuously and set for every level.
Younger climbers get a separate kids space with easier boulders, and teens have their own walls before moving on to the adult areas. The Cantine restaurant has a terrace for parents waiting.
La Terrasse is the open-air roof on the 8th floor of the Galeries Lafayette Haussmann department store, directly above its Art Nouveau glass dome. From the top, kids can pick out the Eiffel Tower and the white Sacré-Cœur on the Montmartre hill across a sea of gray rooftops.
In the warmer months pop-up bars and restaurants set up on the terrace, and in winter an ice rink opens there.
The Eiffel Tower is the 330-meter iron tower on the Champ de Mars, with three levels open to visitors. The first level has a glass floor where kids can stand and look straight down to the ground.
Stairs climb about 600 steps to the second level, and elevators go all the way up. The top, at 276 meters, holds a champagne bar and Gustave Eiffel's old private apartment.
A 10-hectare park built on former rail freight yards, and one of the biggest green spaces in the city. Kids get a playground with log climbing frames, a skate park, basketball courts, ping-pong tables and a boules pitch, with wide lawns in between. Wind turbines, solar panels and rainwater harvesting are part of the design. Locals usually call it Parc Martin Luther King.
A science museum in a huge glass-and-steel hall on the edge of Parc de la Villette. Kids push, pull and test their way through hands-on permanent and temporary exhibitions, sit under the planetarium dome, and walk through the Argonaute, a real navy submarine.
The Cité des enfants has two timed play areas, one for preschoolers and one for school-age kids, built around water play, a forest and a building site.
A stage version of Claude Ponti's picture book, played by La Nad Compagnie. Hipollène, half girl and half squirrel, lives in a giant tree. When her grandmother dies, she sets off through its roots, meets a string of odd characters and comes out braver.
Expect puppets, acrobatics, dance and songs with classical touches. It handles grief gently, which makes it a good opener for a talk at home. Performed in French.
A drag queen reads fairy tales that take a new turn. In these Contes à Paillettes, princesses rescue themselves, sensitive heroes dare to cry, and heroines head off to see the world without asking permission. Expect cunning witches, hairy frogs and imperfect princes.
The organizers say the grown-ups who come along laugh too, and not out of politeness, so it works as a family outing.
Two playgrounds sit in this 4-hectare garden between the Canopée and the Bourse de Commerce, with Saint-Eustache church as a backdrop. Toddlers have a play area for ages 2 to 6.
Older kids get the Terrain d'aventures, a maze-like course designed by sculptor Henri Marquet's team, with the Mégamachines slide structure, a trampoline, swings, spinning tops and planted corners to hide in, run by city play workers.
A new French production of the Broadway musical based on the DreamWorks film, staged by Philippe Hersen for the first film's 25th anniversary. Shrek, Donkey, Fiona, Lord Farquaad and the banished fairy-tale characters are all there, with a pop rock, soul and funk score.
Sung and spoken in French, so it suits kids who know the film well enough to follow along, or who speak French.
A day of spoken stories at a neighborhood library in the 14th. Storyteller François-Moïse Bamba gives two shows: "Ma Tié, raconte-moi les animaux" for younger kids and "Contes du Burkina Faso" for older ones.
In between, an open stage lets anyone listen or step up and tell a story, followed by a shared snack. The shows are in French, so they suit kids who follow spoken French.
A walk-through Christmas show at the Grand Hôtel des Rêves in the Latin Quarter. Families follow young Yule from room to room, through a world of nisses, witches and magic wardrobes, tracing the very first Christmas present from an old toy shop to a post office at the far edge of the North Pole.
It suits kids who like fairy tales and can follow a story told in French.
Kids and parents work side by side to make seed bombs: small balls of compost, clay and wildflower seeds, meant to be tossed onto neglected patches of the city where the rain does the rest.
While they mix and roll, the Les Inventeurs team explains how seeds sprout, what soil does and why biodiversity matters in a city. Each adult works with one child.
Little Cirque is a circus weekend at Little Villette, the kids' space at La Villette. Circus artists coach kids through acrobatic lifts, juggling and balance games, and a second workshop has them fill balloons with semolina to make juggling balls.
A drop-in activity has kids make paper circus figures, or color them in, and put on a miniature circus. Good for beginners who like to move and make things.
A modern retelling of Perrault's Donkey Skin. In a picture-perfect family the polish cracks: Mom walks out, Dad imposes "nap games," and the girl has nightmares. A neighbor keeps watch, and Monique Bergamote, her donkey comfort toy and piggy bank, comes alive to save her.
Writer Marie Dilasser and director Hélène Soulié tackle incest head-on. Best for tweens and teens ready to talk it through afterward.
Eight to twelve is a good age for going out together: old enough to sit through a full musical or a museum workshop, still young enough to want you along. This list pulls together the shows, art weekends and evening festivals that suit that age, with the best fit first. Plans come and go through the season, so check back before the weekend.
Two hands-on art workshops for kids, part of Vivante, an art festival celebrating nature and living things. In the first, artist Sophie Della Corte helps kids imagine and design their own sheet of temporary flash tattoos to take home.
In the second, Studio Pekelo introduces cyanotype, a printing technique known for its shades of blue, and kids compose their own enchanted forest inspired by plant shapes.
On stage, illustrator Laetitia Coryn draws a Louvre masterpiece live while storyteller Nicolas Lafitte tells its story and musician Axl-s plays along, with the audience in on the game. Each episode picks one painting, sculpture or object from the collection and digs into who made it and why.
It's a funny, fast way into a museum that can feel overwhelming with kids.
Kids step into the shoes of a 13th-century apprentice knight in this game-visit through the museum's Ancient Arms and Armor department. Using challenges and objects from the collection, they find out how a knight trained and what his daily life looked like.
Pass the tests and the visit ends with a dubbing. It is a playful way for kids to discover the museum.
Prizoners runs two wizard-themed escape rooms built for kids' birthday parties. Kids arrive as apprentice alchemists: they get a wizard name, put on a cape and drink a potion, then solve puzzles as a team with a game host to recover stolen elixirs, finishing by mixing their own potion.
Afterward the group has a private room for cake and presents, and each kid goes home with a wizard diploma.
Kids invent one comic story as a group with comics writer Judith Peignen. Everyone pitches an idea and votes at each step of the plot.
Then each child draws the story their own way and goes home with their own comic page. It suits kids who like drawing and making up stories, and who are comfortable sharing ideas in French.
Six young actors sing, dance and tap their way through Dickens's story of the orphan who falls in with Fagin's gang of pickpockets in London's back streets. They tell it like 19th-century street hawkers, swapping between Oliver, Nancy, Bill Sikes, Fagin and the Artful Dodger. Expect laughs and a few sad scenes. The show was nominated for a 2026 Molière, France's top theater award, for best young-audience production.
Slava's Snowshow is the show by Russian clown Slava Polunin and his troupe, a hit for more than 30 years. It draws on Chaplin, Fellini and the great slapstick acts.
Clowns in chick yellow and fir green, with rubbery bodies, fill a dreamlike, absurd world with gags. It suits kids who like silly physical comedy and can enjoy a poetic moment too.
Circo Infinito is a contemporary circus show where three performers from the Académie Fratellini mix acrobatics, visual poetry and live music on a set of sails and light.
The organizer pitches it as a feel-good show for all audiences, built around the strength of the group. It runs on movement and music, not words, so kids need no French. It suits school-age kids who can sit through a theater show.
Phia Ménard and Cie Non Nova build puppets out of plastic, then bring them to life with puppeteers' hands and the air from fans. Bodies, objects and landscapes appear, twirl and change shape in a ballet.
A good fit for kids drawn to dance and visual theater; less so for those who want a plot spelled out.
Terre de Rêves is a story told in music, the first young-audience concert of the Saison musicale des Invalides. It follows a shipwrecked Irishman who crosses huge landscapes with the Anishinaabe people, all the way to the Great Lakes.
Banjo, mandolin, double bass and violin carry the tunes, with the story narrated in French. It suits kids who can follow a spoken story and sit through a concert.
Atelier Terres des Batignolles is a ceramics studio near La Fourche, run by sculptor and ceramicist Nadège with a small team of teachers. For children, it hosts clay-modeling birthday parties around one big shared worktable, in a workshop stocked with tools, slips and glazes.
The weekly courses are for adults, so this is a place to book a party, not to drop in with kids.
Moon & Sugar runs baking birthday parties at La petite cuisine de Sandrine, a kitchen studio. The birthday kid and friends bake and decorate their own treats: cupcakes in a theme they choose (unicorns, animals, Halloween, Christmas), decorated shortbread, choux or layer cakes.
A specialized educator who is a trained pastry chef leads. Kids go home with their bakes and a recipe card. Private parties only, no drop-in classes.
Disney's stage version of The Lion King, sung and spoken in French, with the songs kids know as "L'Histoire de la Vie" and "Il vit en toi". The draw for kids is the animals: actors in lion masks, and puppet giraffes, gazelles and a cheetah crossing the savanna on stage.
The story follows the film, Scar included, and the theater warns that some scenes can frighten younger children.
OVO is Cirque du Soleil's insect show. A busy colony eats, flutters and courts across the stage, a ladybug catches the eye of an odd newcomer, and a mysterious egg sets the story going.
Kids get big acrobatics, bright costumes and a simple story to follow. It suits kids who can sit through a long arena show; very young or sound-sensitive kids may find it a lot.
Inside a paper cave, a man finds a mysterious wall, a child calls to him, and animals spring to life by firelight. Philippe Beau, one of the few professional hand-shadow artists, performs alongside magic effects and projected drawings by Compagnie 14:20.
A quiet, poetic piece about prehistoric cave art, narrated in French. It suits kids happy to sit in the dark and watch; restless ones may struggle.
Two 17th-century houses on Rue Cortot tell the story of Montmartre's artists, and one holds the rebuilt studio-apartment where Suzanne Valadon and Maurice Utrillo lived and painted. Around them, the terraced Renoir Gardens, where Renoir painted The Swing, step down to the Clos Montmartre vineyard.
A free game booklet from the front desk turns the permanent collection into a hunt for kids. Toddlers will mostly enjoy the garden.
The Panthéon is a domed 18th-century monument on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, designed by the architect Soufflot. Under the dome, Foucault's pendulum swings on a 67-meter wire, its path slowly shifting as the Earth turns.
Below the nave, the crypt holds the tombs of Victor Hugo, Marie Curie and other figures France chose to honor. Best for school-age kids curious about science or history.
Thoiry Lumières Sauvages is a night walk of nearly 3 km through the park's paths, gardens and maze, lit by more than 3,000 handmade silk sculptures of giant animals, plants and creatures.
This edition, Sur les traces de Pachamama, follows an explorer from the ocean floor to Greenland, Mongolia, India and Peru. A new clue appears at each stop, and the ending stays secret until the last one.
An exhibition that tells the history of the post through fairy tales. The entrance hall has an old stagecoach pulled by postal drones, and the way in is through an ogre's wide-open mouth. Inside, families cross a life-size forest that smells of moss.
Among the 500-plus objects: copies of Peau d'Âne's dresses and a braid of postal hair over two meters tall, a nod to Rapunzel.
Le Noël des Siècles turns the Château de Champs-sur-Marne into a walk-through Christmas tale mixing theater, dance and history. Families follow Ilda through the rooms in 1907, until the Nisse, a genie called up with a bell and a magic formula, sends everyone through three Christmases across time.
Close to 100 volunteers fill the rooms in costume. It suits kids who like dress-up and a story they can walk inside.
Essentiel is the new show from Cirque Arlette Gruss, one of France's traditional family circuses, set up in a heated big top on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes. Expect balancing acts, aerial hoops, juggling, horses, motorbikes and the clown Bellini, all played to a live orchestra.
It suits kids who can sit through a long show and like their circus classic rather than experimental.
A night visit of Versailles staged as a show. After the crowds leave, families walk the Grand Apartments while baroque musicians, singers, dancers and fencers perform room by room, with a dance in the Hall of Mirrors.
This year's theme is Marie-Antoinette and fashion, and the walk ends in the Gallery of Battles with a baroque Santa. It suits kids who can stay on their feet the whole way.
The royal palace south of Paris dresses up for the holidays. A Christmas show plays most days of the break, and a festive table is laid in the Salle des Gardes with royal and imperial china from the collections, right on the visit route.
Concerts and family tours round out the program. It suits school-age kids happy to walk a long palace circuit.
The classical Nutcracker ballet, set to Tchaikovsky's score, is back after last season's run. Clara gets a nutcracker as a Christmas Eve present, and during the night the toy comes to life and takes her into a world of fantasy characters.
It suits kids who already like dance or music and can sit through a long show, plus any grown-up who loves classical ballet.
France's postal museum fills three floors by Gare Montparnasse with postal vehicles, carrier uniforms, sorting gear and a panorama of French stamps from the first issues to today.
Kids pick up a free game booklet or a multimedia guide with a family trail at the front desk, then hunt for clues through the rooms. Storytelling visits and printmaking workshops add a hands-on side.
The museum of the Paris Mint sits inside a working factory on the Seine. Kids look onto the engraving and foundry workshops, often catch a live engraving demonstration, and try striking coins at interactive stations.
The route is built for touch, smell and sound as well as looking, and the collection runs to 170,000 coins, medals, tools and old minting machines.
Ceramoka is a paint-your-own ceramics studio with a small café near Porte de Saint-Cloud. Kids pick a white earthenware piece off the shelves, such as a mug, plate or bowl, and paint it with non-toxic colors. Nobody needs to know how to draw: staff give a short briefing, and stencils and templates are on hand. The studio then glazes the piece and fires it in its kiln.
Hapik is a fun-climbing hall inside the Centre sportif et culturel Camille Muffat. The walls are colorful themed challenges rather than standard routes, each with an auto-belay rope, so kids climb on their own with no experience.
There is also an indoor ropes course in via ferrata style, a leap-of-faith jump, bamboo poles and an interactive climbing game, plus a snack bar.
Choco-Story tells 4,000 years of cocoa history, from the Maya to the modern chocolate bar, through a collection of about a thousand objects in three sections.
A chocolatier makes chocolate live in front of visitors, and the tastings along the route are all you can eat. Kids under 12 follow the tour with a game booklet, and the chocolate art area includes a 3-meter sculpture made from 200kg of chocolate.
The Musée Rodin fills the Hôtel Biron mansion and the sculpture garden around it. Indoors are marble and plaster works such as The Kiss, plus pieces by Camille Claudel.
Outside, kids can circle The Thinker, look up at the crowded figures of The Gates of Hell and walk among The Burghers of Calais, with a café set in the middle of the garden.
Musée Carnavalet is the city's history museum, running from prehistoric oak dugout canoes to the 20th century. For kids, the standouts are two rooms of old shop signs, the Gallo-Roman finds, and the Revolution rooms with a heater shaped like the Bastille and Marie Antoinette's slipper.
Later rooms hold Mucha's Art Nouveau jewelry shop and Proust's bedroom, and the gardens are open for a snack break.
The Musée de l'Armée fills the Hôtel des Invalides with French military history, from medieval suits of armor and samurai gear to the Napoleonic era and both world wars. Cannons line the main courtyard, and Napoleon's tomb sits under the golden Dôme. The Plans-Reliefs museum shows giant scale models of fortified towns.
Kids who like knights and battles get the most from it; the world war galleries suit older children.
The Musée de l'Homme tells the story of our species in a 2,500 m² gallery that looks out over the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. Kids come face to face with Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon skulls, a Peruvian mummy and a painted Senegalese bus, listen at a wall of world languages, and try sensory stations along the way.
The Paris Sewer Museum sits inside working sewer tunnels under the Pont de l'Alma. An elevator takes visitors down to a 500-meter walk through real galleries, past the machinery sewer workers use to clear the tunnels, scale models, and displays on how the city cleans its water.
Kids who like machines, pipes and how things work get the most out of it. Expect some smells and damp air.
The national music museum holds nearly 9,000 instruments and artworks, laid out from the late 1500s to today: Stradivari violins, an octobass, Theremin and Hammond electronics, a gallery of Fender and Gibson electric guitars, and instruments from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. A free video guide lets kids see and hear the instruments played, and musicians give short live performances in the galleries every day.
Around 3,500 objects from Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas line one long circuit, set on either side of a central aisle shaped like a river. Themed nooks off the path focus on one region or kind of work, and displays rotate often. Outside, a garden by the Seine opens earlier and closes later than the museum. Suits kids who like hunting for faces in carved masks.
Musée de la Magie fills 16th-century vaulted cellars in the Marais with the history of conjuring: animated automata, optical illusions, hand-cranked mutoscopes, posters and the props of famous magicians.
Guides lead most rooms and tell the stories behind the pieces; the automata room is self-guided. Entry includes a live close-up magic show, and the shop at the center sells books and beginner tricks.
Volte is this season's new show at the Cirque d'Hiver, the 1852 circus building run by the Bouglione family. It is classic ring circus: a prize-winning flying trapeze troupe, slackline, diabolo, breakdancers, juggling, clowns and a horse-and-pony act, all led by Monsieur Loyal and a live orchestra.
It suits kids old enough to sit through a full-length show, and grandparents who remember the circus this way.
Lire en Délire is a children's book festival in the Belleville and Fontaine-au-Roi neighborhood, now in its 17th edition. Local bookshops, theaters, libraries and community centers host author signings, writing and pop-up book workshops, kids' plays, exhibitions and readings.
It ends with a book fair where kids meet authors and illustrators, join creative workshops and hear stories read aloud.
Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary art center by the Seine, runs hands-on art workshops in the hamo, its studio space. Kids look at the current exhibitions, then make something: younger ones rebuild mountains out of clothes or weave a spider's house, older ones make a bandit's bandana or a color-filter spyglass. In the family workshop, everyone builds a shelter for a home's unseen neighbors, from spiders to hydrangeas.
Patins en Folie is an open-air ice rink in Parc André Citroën, billed as the city's largest. Mornings suit beginners and families, with a separate area for small children and lessons from skating pros.
In the evening, music and lighting turn the ice into a dance floor for teens and adults. A food village serves hot chocolate, waffles and seasonal dishes between laps.
A night walk through part of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, lit by nearly 2,000 handmade lanterns: tigers, elephants, temples, deities and festival scenes from India, with music along the route. Kids see something new every few steps, from a family of tigers to a painted elephant. It ends in a food court serving Indian dishes. This is the park's fourth lantern festival, after China and Japan.
Odyssée is the new show from Cirque Phénix, performed by 40 acrobats from Les Étoiles du Cirque de Pékin. Expect plate spinning, hoop diving, foot juggling and balancing acts, with bold costumes, big sets and loud, modern music.
There are no animals, no ringmaster and no classic clowns, so it suits kids who want nonstop skill. It is long and loud for preschoolers.
The Musée d'Orsay is turning 40, and it is celebrating with a festive weekend of music and shows for families, on top of the usual galleries.
Kids can watch a new show based on France Inter's hit podcast Les Fabuleuses histoires du doudou, catch Aldebert and his Enfantillages in concert, hear the Maîtrise populaire de l'Opéra-Comique, and join singing and dance workshops. Best for kids who follow French.
For one weekend the medieval walled town of Provins, a UNESCO World Heritage site, becomes an open-air stage. Troubadours, jugglers and street performers work the crowds, jousts and games fill the squares, and craftspeople and traders line the lanes. Thousands of visitors come in costume.
It suits kids who love knights and castles, and families happy to spend a day in a big crowd.
France's national open-gardens weekend, run by the Ministry of Culture. Public parks, private estates and botanical gardens open their gates, some of them only for this weekend. Families find guided tours, workshops, walks and the odd concert among the flower beds.
The 2027 theme is lawns, meadows and grasslands. It suits kids who like to look closely at plants and bugs, less so ones who need a playground.
France's national day opens with a military parade down the Champs-Élysées, from the Arc de Triomphe toward Place de la Concorde. Kids watch jets trail blue, white and red smoke overhead, then helicopters, marching troops, armored vehicles and the mounted Republican Guard.
It suits kids who can handle a long wait in a big crowd and loud flyovers. Toddlers and noise-sensitive kids may do better watching the jets from farther away.
For one weekend a year, France opens buildings that are usually closed to the public: government ministries, courts, military sites, churches, artisan workshops and private mansions. In Paris that means a long list of doors at once, with guided tours, craft demonstrations, small plays and concerts alongside.
Kids get to walk into rooms most adults never see, and many sites run games or workshops just for them.
Canauxrama runs narrated boat trips along the Canal Saint-Martin, between Bassin de la Villette and Port de l'Arsenal by Bastille. Kids watch the boat work through 8 locks, pass 2 swing bridges and the Crimée lift bridge, then glide through the vault beneath Bastille, lit by skylights. Guides tell stories of Napoleon and old Paris along the way. The full canal trip runs one way, so plan the ride back.
LudoJardin is the fenced playground inside the Jardin du Luxembourg, built around a nature theme with wooden decks and paths. Kids cross hanging bridges, find their way through a labyrinth, fly down a zip line and take the slides.
Parents stay inside with their children. The garden's pony rides, carousel, puppet theater and toy sailboats on the pond are a short walk away.
The Musée des Arts Décoratifs fills a wing of the Louvre palace with eight centuries of design: furniture, everyday objects, toys and fashion, around 6,000 pieces across seven floors.
Workshops pair a gallery visit with a hands-on project, some for kids alone and some for families. It suits kids who like clothes and making things; toddlers who need to run will find it slow.
Studio des Ursulines is a single-screen cinema near the Luxembourg Gardens, open since 1926 and the first art-house cinema in France. Since 2003 it has programmed mainly for young audiences: animated features, short-film programs, ciné-concerts with live music, previews and festivals such as Mon Premier Festival for the youngest. Kids' films carry a starting age, many from 3 or 4, and some screenings come with workshops or meet-the-filmmaker talks.
Batobus is a hop-on hop-off boat service on the Seine, with nine stops between the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin des Plantes, including the Louvre, Notre-Dame and the Musée d'Orsay. The trimarans are glassed in and heated, with an open-air deck at the back.
A full loop takes about 1 hour 45 minutes, so kids can ride the river between sights instead of walking, or stay aboard the whole way.
Bateaux-Mouches runs commentated sightseeing cruises on the Seine from the Pont de l'Alma, on the right bank. The big passenger boats pass the Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, the Conciergerie and Notre-Dame, then return to the same pier without stops.
Kids can tick off the landmarks as they slide by. The company also runs brunch, lunch and dinner cruises.
The navy and seafaring museum in the Palais de Chaillot shows more than 1,000 objects across themed galleries. Kids walk into a life-size ship's prow under a dome film of the sea, step inside a giant wave in the shipwrecks room, and study ship models nearly 5 meters long, gilded figureheads, compasses and lighthouse lenses.
A family trail marked with flags runs through the route.
The Cité fills part of the Palais de Chaillot with full-size plaster casts of French cathedral portals and statues, full-size copies of medieval wall paintings, and a modern architecture gallery of models, drawings and building fragments. Kids can walk right up to carved saints and doorways usually seen high on a facade.
Weekends and school holidays bring family tours and hands-on workshops.
A private museum of fairground rides, automatons and show objects from the 19th and early 20th centuries, set in Bercy's old wine pavilions. Guides who double as performers lead every visit, start up the musical automatons and invite visitors onto century-old carousels, including a merry-go-round turned by pedaling bicycles.
The halls include a Belle Epoque funfair and a little Venice with its own lagoon.
The Musée des Arts et Métiers holds more than 2,400 inventions across seven collections, from scientific instruments to transport. The standout room is the former church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, where early planes hang over vintage cars and Foucault's pendulum swings in the nave.
Kids can also find Bartholdi's original model of the Statue of Liberty and Pascal's mechanical calculator, and museum staff run demonstrations in the galleries.
The Gruss family has put on horse shows since 1974. This season's show is an equestrian musical with original music, mixing riding stunts, aerial acts, tightrope and comic sketches, with a live orchestra and seats all around the ring.
Before the show there's a meal with live music, and afterward the artists come out to chat. It suits horse-mad kids and anyone happy to sit through a long show.
The biggest Christmas market in the Paris region fills the La Défense esplanade with more than 350 wooden chalets. Kids come for the ice rink, the carousels, the costumed parades and a visit to Santa and Mrs. Claus. At the elves' workshop in Santa's house, younger ones make their own Christmas decorations to take home. Grown-ups get treats and gift shopping among the office towers.
The Magie de Noël is the first Christmas market to open in France: 95 wooden chalets and rides spread over a hectare of the Tuileries Garden.
Kids can go down the giant slide, ride Santa's little train and the Christmas carousel, skate on a 250 m² rink and meet Santa in his chalet. Grown-ups browse craft gifts from makers across France.
La Magie de Noël fills a corner of the Jardin des Tuileries, between the Louvre and Place de la Concorde, with 95 wooden chalets and rides. Most chalets sell goods made in France.
Kids come for the fairground: a giant slide, hook-a-duck, Santa's little train and treasure hunts for small ones, bumper cars, flying chairs and a small roller coaster for older ones, with the Grande Roue Ferris wheel overhead.
Each winter the nave of the Grand Palais becomes an indoor ice rink, billed as the largest in the world, under the building's famous glass and steel roof. Kids skate on the main rink or in a separate area kept just for children.
Between laps, the mountain-style restaurant serves crêpes, waffles and hot chocolate. Evening sessions run late and suit teens and adults more than young kids.
France's biggest farm show fills the Porte de Versailles halls with cows, sheep, goats, pigs, horses and donkeys, brought in by breeders from across the country. Kids can get close to the animals, watch the judging in the show rings and taste food from every French region and overseas territory.
It suits animal-mad kids of any age. Expect big crowds, especially at weekends.
Marché Bastille is an open-air street market that runs along Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, from rue Amelot to rue Saint-Sabin, a short walk from Place de la Bastille. Stalls of fruit, vegetables and other fresh food line the route, so kids can walk the aisles, point out what they want to try and help pick lunch.
It suits an unhurried morning walk with a stroller and a shopping bag.
Marché d'Aligre is a street market along rue d'Aligre, with food stalls lining both sides. In the middle, on place d'Aligre, sits Marché Beauvau, a covered market hall built in 1843 and listed as a historic monument.
Kids can help pick fruit and vegetables at the stalls, then peek inside the old hall.
Georges-Vallerey is the 50-meter pool built for the 1924 Paris Olympics, now under a wooden roof that slides open in good weather. A movable wall can split it into two 25-meter pools, and a moving floor sets the depth from 0.9 to 2.15 meters, so some days have a shallow end. It suits kids who can swim or are learning; there is no separate toddler pool.
Bowling Mouffetard has eight bowling lanes plus billiard tables, on Rue Mouffetard, the old market street of the Latin Quarter. Shoes and balls come with each game, and socks are required (disposable ones are handed out).
Weekend mornings and weekday afternoons draw families. Evenings, especially Friday to Sunday, turn into a grown-up night out with no bookings taken.
An 800 m² ice rink under a glass roof, inside the Espace Sportif Pailleron a few streets from the Buttes-Chaumont park. Most of its ice time goes to public sessions rather than clubs, with music playing over the ice.
A rest area sits beside the rink, and a walkway and stands around it let parents watch from off the ice. Skates and helmets are for hire at the desk.
A public pool built on a barge moored on the Seine, beside the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand. The 25-meter pool sits under a glass roof that opens in summer, when a 500 m² sun deck with views of the river boats opens too.
It suits kids who swim confidently: there is no separate shallow pool for toddlers.
Smile World Bercy 2 fills 4,000 m² on the top floor of the Bercy 2 shopping center with an indoor karting track, a trampoline park, a laser game maze, arcade games and private karaoke rooms. It is the only Smile World with karting and trampolines.
Kids can book one activity or combine a few, and a bar serves pizzas and sharing boards between sessions.
The Puces de Saint-Ouen is the world's largest cluster of antique and secondhand dealers, spread over seven hectares just past the northern edge of Paris. Eleven covered markets, among them Vernaison, Paul Bert Serpette and Dauphine, sit alongside five shopping streets and sidewalk stalls. Kids who like a treasure hunt can wander narrow alleys packed with old furniture, paintings, crystal and vintage clothes.
Place du Tertre is the old village square at the top of Montmartre, a few streets from the Sacré-Cœur basilica. Painters set up easels here every day, and portrait artists sketch visitors, kids included, while families watch.
Picasso, Modigliani and Utrillo lived nearby in the early 1900s. The Montmartre funicular climbs from the foot of the hill to Sacré-Cœur, skipping the Rue Foyatier stairs.
A Gothic royal chapel from the 1240s, tucked inside the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité. The lower chapel has a low, painted blue-and-gold vault. A narrow spiral staircase leads to the upper chapel, where walls of stained glass hold 1,113 scenes from the Bible.
Kids who like spotting details can hunt for kings, animals and battles. Sunny days light the glass best.
The Arc de Triomphe stands at the top of the Champs-Élysées, in the middle of Place de l'Étoile. Kids climb 284 steps inside the arch to a rooftop terrace that looks down the avenues to the Eiffel Tower.
Under the arch are the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and its flame, framed by huge sculpted groups on the pillars. The climb suits kids who can handle a long staircase.
The Natural History Museum's zoo sits on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes, under its landmark Grand Rocher. Over 3,000 animals live in five biozones: Africa, Patagonia, Europe, Amazon-Guyana and Madagascar.
Kids watch giraffes and white rhinos on the African plain, penguins and sea lions in Patagonia, and lemurs up close in Madagascar. A tropical greenhouse with manatees makes a warm stop on a cold day.
Car-free stretches of the Seine's banks, 4.5 km on the right bank and 2.5 km on the left, form a 10-hectare riverside park. Kids get a 40-meter balance trail of stumps and logs from Paris trees, and a docks-themed play corner with a pontoon, a small boat and a crate maze.
The paths double as a cycle route where walkers have priority, and about fifteen cafés and barges line the way.
Also called the Promenade Plantée, this 4.5 km walkway follows an old railway line from Bastille toward the Bois de Vincennes. One stretch runs on a viaduct above Avenue Daumesnil at treetop height, then the path drops through tunnels and cuttings into the Reuilly gardens.
The arches below hold the Viaduc des Arts, where some craftspeople work in glass-front workshops. It suits a long stroller walk or a slow family ramble.
Parc de Belleville covers a steep hillside, with the Willy Ronis belvedere at the top looking out over the rooftops of Paris. A cascading fountain over 100 meters long runs down the slope between stairs, pergolas and terraced lawns.
Kids head for the playground, the ping-pong tables and the foosball table, and can spot the small vineyard, replanted in 1992 where monks once made wine.
The world's largest tethered balloon rises 150 meters above Parc André Citroën on a steel cable, carrying up to 30 passengers for a flight of about 10 minutes. It runs on helium and an electric winch, so the ride is silent, with a 360-degree view over the Seine and the Eiffel Tower.
Since 2013 it has also worked as a flying lab that measures the city's air pollution.
Parc André-Citroën sits on the site of the old Citroën car factory beside the Seine. A long central lawn runs down to a canal, renovated in 2024 with shallow streams, floating gardens and geyser jets near the river.
Kids run through the fountain jets on hot days, then head to the playground, the merry-go-rounds or the ping-pong tables. Glass greenhouses and a series of themed gardens round it out.
Opened in 1794, the Ménagerie is one of the oldest zoos in the world, set inside the Jardin des Plantes. It keeps about 500 animals from 122 species, mostly small and medium-sized: red pandas, snow leopards, orangutans, Seychelles tortoises, Malayan tapirs and keas.
The listed buildings are part of the visit, from the 1805 Bear Pits to the art deco Vivarium, the Singerie and the Great Aviary.
The only amusement park inside the Paris city limits, set at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Around 45 rides run from a dragon roller coaster and flying swings to a pirate ship, a mirror maze and a Guignol puppet theater.
The farm side has dwarf goats, alpacas, Ouessant sheep and some 450 birds, and toddlers get a paddling pool and a bear-themed maze.
A former 1835 steel foundry where 140 projectors cover the walls of a 1,500 m² hall with moving artworks set to music. Visitors walk through the images, then see them multiplied in a mirror tower.
In the Atelier des Enfants, kids color a dinosaur or Renaissance template, scan it, and watch their drawing come to life on the wall. The main show changes through the year.
Frank Gehry's building looks like a ship under twelve glass sails, set at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Inside, 11 galleries hold modern and contemporary art shows that change through the year.
For kids, the outside is half the visit: stairs climb to roof terraces with views over the trees, and a water basin runs along the base, beside Olafur Eliasson's glowing column corridor, Inside the Horizon.
Aquarium de Paris sits under the Trocadéro gardens, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. Around 50 tanks hold some 13,500 fish and invertebrates from French seas, including 35 sharks and 400 coral colonies. The jellyfish gallery has 24 tanks with species that rotate.
Talks and shows during the day come with entry. The route slopes gently with no stairs, so strollers go all the way around.
A wax museum on the Grands Boulevards where kids pose next to life-size figures of footballers, singers and cartoon heroes like Paw Patrol, Miraculous and the Little Prince.
A walk-through history section runs from the Chauvet cave to Louis XIV's court and Napoleon, and there's a new One Piece area. Many figures are French TV stars, so visiting kids may know mostly the athletes and cartoons.
The Musée d'Orsay fills a former railway station, built 1898 to 1900 on the Left Bank of the Seine. Under the glass roof of the old train hall, a long central nave is lined with sculptures, and a gilded station clock hangs at one end.
The galleries hold Impressionist paintings kids may know from books: Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône and Monet's Blue Water Lilies.
The Louvre is a former royal palace with about 35,000 works on display, from Egyptian antiquities to the Mona Lisa. It is huge and tiring for kids, so families do best picking one wing and keeping the visit short.
The Studio, on the ground floor of the Richelieu wing, has drawing activities, board games, a reading nook and a baby space with a bottle warmer and nursing chair.
France's national aviation museum fills 12 halls and an outdoor tarmac at Le Bourget airport with more than 100 aircraft, from the first flying machines and a Spitfire to two Concordes.
Kids can walk inside a Boeing 747, play pilot or astronaut at Planète Pilote's 40 hands-on stations, catch a planetarium show, and climb the restored 1953 control tower for a view over the runways.
A long 1898 hall in the Jardin des Plantes, part of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. The ground floor holds a herd of vertebrate skeletons, from fish and birds to a whale, lined up to show how bones adapt to the way an animal lives.
Upstairs, dinosaur skeletons, mammoths and fossils fill the galleries. It suits kids who love bones and big animals more than hands-on play.
A two-part family workshop at the Louvre. It starts in the Near Eastern Antiquities galleries, looking closely at a mysterious ancient statuette and uncovering a few of its secrets.
Then comes the making: kids fold, twist and shape clay into a figurine of their own. It's a family session, so parents join in and should expect clay on their hands too.
Europe's biggest children's book fair fills Paris Montreuil Expo with close to 400 publishers, from picture books and comics to teen fiction and kids' magazines.
Kids browse the stands, get books signed by authors and illustrators, and drop into readings, talks, workshops and an exhibition on this year's theme, "Aux frontières du réel". It suits young readers of every age, from board books to YA.
L'Heure Joyeuse opened in 1924 as the first children's library in Paris. Its two floors hold a children's space and a teen and adult space, with about 25,000 books, CDs, DVDs and board games on open shelves.
Kids can borrow kamishibai paper-theater sets, play board games, use computers set aside for young readers, and join storytimes, workshops, film screenings and shows.
Aquaboulevard is a big indoor water park at Balard, with the water kept at 29°C all year. Inside are two wave pools, 11 slides, rivers with a current, geysers, water mushrooms and jacuzzis.
In summer, outdoor pools and a 4,000 m² sand beach open too. A Gaumont cinema, a McDonald's and a Decathlon share the same complex.
The largest bouldering and roped-climbing gym in the capital, spread over 4,000 m². Kids can boulder on walls up to 4 meters high over thick mats with no harness, or tie in on roped walls around 10 meters high.
Instructors run a climbing school, family sessions and school-holiday programs. A café-bar serves light meals, and a separate studio hosts yoga.
A bouldering gym at the foot of Montmartre, a few steps from Montmartre Cemetery, with more than 12 problems at each grade and routes reset all the time. Kids from 3 to 12 get their own area of colorful walls, while teens climb the adult sectors.
Classes, school-holiday camps and climbing birthday parties run year-round, and the Cantine restaurant on site serves seasonal dishes with vegetarian options.
Notre-Dame is the Gothic cathedral on the Île de la Cité, built between 1163 and 1345 and reopened in December 2024 after the 2019 fire. Inside, kids can look up at the restored stone vaults and the big rose windows.
A separate climb up the south tower runs 424 steps past the gargoyles, which were built as rain spouts, to views across Paris from 69 meters up.
Sacré-Cœur sits on top of the Montmartre hill, and the steps and lawns below its white domes are where families stop to look out over the rooftops. Inside, kids can hunt for the huge mosaic of Christ above the choir.
The bigger adventure is the dome: 280 steps up a narrow staircase, past the basilica roofs, to a walkway with a 360-degree view of Paris and its monuments.
A long, narrow garden on the Left Bank of the Seine, running along Quai Saint-Bernard between Pont de Sully and Place Valhubert. Kids get a playground, a skate park, ping-pong tables, a soccer pitch and street workout bars, with sculptures set along the riverside paths.
Jardin d'Éole is a long, narrow park built on former rail land beside the tracks, on the edge of the 18th and 19th arrondissements. Its 4-plus hectares hold toddler playgrounds, a basketball court, ping-pong tables, a tennis practice wall and space for ball games, along with a big meadow, a planted canal and a gravel garden. One of its eight drinking fountains pours sparkling water.
Parc Floral is a 30-hectare botanical park in the Bois de Vincennes, laid out as themed gardens, an oak grove and pavilions of bonsai, ferns and Jurassic plants.
For kids there is a playground with sandboxes and swings, a Guignol puppet theater, minigolf, a treetop ropes course, an escape game and four-wheel pedal bikes to rent. On warm days the open-air stage hosts Pestacles, a children's music festival.
The Grande Galerie de l'Évolution is the Natural History Museum's main hall at the Jardin des Plantes, an 1889 iron-and-glass nave holding about 7,000 specimens. Downstairs, whales and a giant squid loom over sea life. Upstairs, an elephant leads a parade of savannah animals, and the lights and soundtrack run from dawn to a passing storm. A room of threatened and extinct species holds a giant panda and a Tasmanian tiger.
The food hall of Le Bon Marché department store, stocked with groceries from France and around the world. Kids can browse shelves of chocolate, a pastry counter, a blue-tiled fish counter, and stacks of fruit and miniature vegetables.
It is a shop, not a play space, so it suits kids who like looking at food more than running around.
Seven Squares is a 5,000m² indoor leisure center inside the Boom Boom Villette mall, next to the Cité des Sciences. Its pirate-themed soft play, L'Île de Tortuga, has a separate toddler area with ball pits and foam blocks, and a big-kid maze of slides, tunnels, a pirate ship and a kart track.
Older kids can move on to the trampoline park, bowling, laser game, VR and the arcade.
La Gaîté Lyrique is a City of Paris cultural center in a listed 19th-century theater. The ground floor and first floor are open to wander, with a café-bar, artist exhibitions and a workshop space.
Kids' programs include Contes à paillettes storytelling one Sunday a month and the Les Grands Yeux children's festival. Teens get the Centre Pompidou's Studio 13/16, a 400 m² creative lab on level 1.
A large city library set in the historic Saint-Lazare enclosure, behind Square Alban Satragne. The children's section holds about 30,000 books, comics, audiobooks, CDs and DVDs, with a kids' comics corner, board games and video games.
It also houses the Heure Joyeuse collection, children's books from the 16th century to today, and a 70m² gallery that runs three exhibitions a year.
Arkose Chevaleret is a bouldering gym with more than 1,000 m² of short walls climbed without ropes over thick mats, plus a warm-up area and a sauna. Routes are reset continuously and set for every level.
Younger climbers get a separate kids space with easier boulders, and teens have their own walls before moving on to the adult areas. The Cantine restaurant has a terrace for parents waiting.
La Terrasse is the open-air roof on the 8th floor of the Galeries Lafayette Haussmann department store, directly above its Art Nouveau glass dome. From the top, kids can pick out the Eiffel Tower and the white Sacré-Cœur on the Montmartre hill across a sea of gray rooftops.
In the warmer months pop-up bars and restaurants set up on the terrace, and in winter an ice rink opens there.
The Eiffel Tower is the 330-meter iron tower on the Champ de Mars, with three levels open to visitors. The first level has a glass floor where kids can stand and look straight down to the ground.
Stairs climb about 600 steps to the second level, and elevators go all the way up. The top, at 276 meters, holds a champagne bar and Gustave Eiffel's old private apartment.
A 10-hectare park built on former rail freight yards, and one of the biggest green spaces in the city. Kids get a playground with log climbing frames, a skate park, basketball courts, ping-pong tables and a boules pitch, with wide lawns in between. Wind turbines, solar panels and rainwater harvesting are part of the design. Locals usually call it Parc Martin Luther King.
A science museum in a huge glass-and-steel hall on the edge of Parc de la Villette. Kids push, pull and test their way through hands-on permanent and temporary exhibitions, sit under the planetarium dome, and walk through the Argonaute, a real navy submarine.
The Cité des enfants has two timed play areas, one for preschoolers and one for school-age kids, built around water play, a forest and a building site.
A stage version of Claude Ponti's picture book, played by La Nad Compagnie. Hipollène, half girl and half squirrel, lives in a giant tree. When her grandmother dies, she sets off through its roots, meets a string of odd characters and comes out braver.
Expect puppets, acrobatics, dance and songs with classical touches. It handles grief gently, which makes it a good opener for a talk at home. Performed in French.
A drag queen reads fairy tales that take a new turn. In these Contes à Paillettes, princesses rescue themselves, sensitive heroes dare to cry, and heroines head off to see the world without asking permission. Expect cunning witches, hairy frogs and imperfect princes.
The organizers say the grown-ups who come along laugh too, and not out of politeness, so it works as a family outing.
Two playgrounds sit in this 4-hectare garden between the Canopée and the Bourse de Commerce, with Saint-Eustache church as a backdrop. Toddlers have a play area for ages 2 to 6.
Older kids get the Terrain d'aventures, a maze-like course designed by sculptor Henri Marquet's team, with the Mégamachines slide structure, a trampoline, swings, spinning tops and planted corners to hide in, run by city play workers.
A new French production of the Broadway musical based on the DreamWorks film, staged by Philippe Hersen for the first film's 25th anniversary. Shrek, Donkey, Fiona, Lord Farquaad and the banished fairy-tale characters are all there, with a pop rock, soul and funk score.
Sung and spoken in French, so it suits kids who know the film well enough to follow along, or who speak French.
A day of spoken stories at a neighborhood library in the 14th. Storyteller François-Moïse Bamba gives two shows: "Ma Tié, raconte-moi les animaux" for younger kids and "Contes du Burkina Faso" for older ones.
In between, an open stage lets anyone listen or step up and tell a story, followed by a shared snack. The shows are in French, so they suit kids who follow spoken French.
A walk-through Christmas show at the Grand Hôtel des Rêves in the Latin Quarter. Families follow young Yule from room to room, through a world of nisses, witches and magic wardrobes, tracing the very first Christmas present from an old toy shop to a post office at the far edge of the North Pole.
It suits kids who like fairy tales and can follow a story told in French.
Kids and parents work side by side to make seed bombs: small balls of compost, clay and wildflower seeds, meant to be tossed onto neglected patches of the city where the rain does the rest.
While they mix and roll, the Les Inventeurs team explains how seeds sprout, what soil does and why biodiversity matters in a city. Each adult works with one child.
Little Cirque is a circus weekend at Little Villette, the kids' space at La Villette. Circus artists coach kids through acrobatic lifts, juggling and balance games, and a second workshop has them fill balloons with semolina to make juggling balls.
A drop-in activity has kids make paper circus figures, or color them in, and put on a miniature circus. Good for beginners who like to move and make things.
A modern retelling of Perrault's Donkey Skin. In a picture-perfect family the polish cracks: Mom walks out, Dad imposes "nap games," and the girl has nightmares. A neighbor keeps watch, and Monique Bergamote, her donkey comfort toy and piggy bank, comes alive to save her.
Writer Marie Dilasser and director Hélène Soulié tackle incest head-on. Best for tweens and teens ready to talk it through afterward.
