Things to Do with Kids in the 6th Arrondissement

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.

This wooden-horse carousel on the west side of the Jardin du Luxembourg was designed by Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera, and opened in 1879.

Kids on the outer circle of horses get a short stick and try to spear metal rings as they ride past, an old French game called jeu de bagues. Rilke wrote his poem "The Carousel" about this one.

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 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.

Guignol du Luxembourg is a historic puppet theater inside the Luxembourg Gardens. The shows mix classic Guignol adventures with fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood and The Princess and the Frog.

A new team runs it after a 2026 renovation of the stage lighting, sound and electrics. The LudoJardin playground and the toy sailboat pond are a few minutes' walk away.

The Senate's garden mixes formal French lawns with wooded English-style paths around the Grand Bassin, where kids rent toy sailboats and push them across the pond.

Elsewhere there are pony rides, a carousel, a puppet theater, a playground, swings and sandpits. Older kids can shoot hoops or play table tennis and chess, and 102 statues and the Medici Fountain line the walks.