Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum

The Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum is a hands-on, interactive children’s museum that features three floors of fun for children to play. Splash in the water table, mold with kinetic sand, send balls through wind tubes, invent and build in Real Tools, and more! Through open, imaginative play, children are inspired to become explorers and creators of the world! Below are our exhibit areas within the Children’s Museum. For a more detailed description of each, please visit the PlayHouse website.

• Light Wall: Explore prisms, shadows, mirrors, and color filters on the light wall! Discover how light interacts with the physical world by making patterns, new colors, or something else all on your own!
• Motion Commotion: Explore air pressure, gravity, and trajectory, in Motion Commotion! With tubes and rails, you can discover the best way to fill up the ball drop or use our magnetic PVC pieces to create your own path for balls to follow!
• PlayHouse Theater: Lights! Camera! Imagination! The stage and the screen are waiting for you in the PlayHouse Theatre. Whether kids have a story to tell, a creative vision, or simply want to sell tickets the Theatre has a place for everyone to play.
• Sci-Lab: Microscopes, building materials, and magnets all come together in the Sci-Lab to create an interactive scientific experience! Sci-Lab is the perfect space for inquiring young minds to explore the world around them.
• Tot Town: Imaginative play abounds in this tiny town! There’s mail that needs delivering, food that needs serving, babies that need to be taken care of, teeth that need to be checked, and endless other day-to-day tasks that can be explored in Tot Town!
• Train Station: All aboard the Imagination Express! Visit the Train Station for all of your train-based desires. Whether you want to drive the big train yourself or play with the little ones going down the tracks, the Train Station has it all.
• Water Table: Enter the splash zone and get ready to explore our child-sized flowing river. Featuring a rain cloud, mushroom fountain, scales, and a lock endless fun awaits you by the river!
• Family Farm: Come on down and imagine what life is like for Illinois farmers at our Family Farm! Mootilda that cow is ready for milking and the chickens have been laying their eggs all over the place. There’s a farmer’s market to run and food in the kitchen waiting to be cooked.
• Fossils Rock: Calling all archeologists the sand in Fossils Rock is full of new discoveries waiting to be made! Take a stop at the fossil table and learn about the creatures that once walked the earth and how we know they were there!
• Musical Bridge: Do, Re, Play! Each step plays a new note on our musical bridge. Whether you want to play a simple tune or run scales over and over again, there’s endless fun just over the bridge.
• Real Tools: Real Tools is filled with recycled materials kids can use to create anything; from telescopes to trombones! Real Tools also provides a safe and monitored environment for kids to try out new tools and new skills whether they’re ready to try out big kid scissors or a hand saw Real Tools has it all!
• Cublets: Look at those robots go! Take a turn building with the Cubelets and you get to decide what kind of robot you want to make. From lighthouses to race cars come see what you can design!
• Keva Blocks: Get ready to build with our KEVA Planks! A world of creation awaits with these simple wooden blocks. Build the colosseum, a house, or whatever you can imagine. With the KEVA Planks, there is no limit to your imagination!