As long-time readers may know, my all-time favorite Boston-area children’s museum is the Discovery Museum in Acton, MA. This STEAM-focused children’s museum boasts 4.5 acres of indoor and outdoor science and nature exploration—and delivers loads of fun! When my children were young, we spent a lot of time there on weekends, especially in the winter when we needed to get out of the house. The interactive, hands-on activities were just as much fun for me as they were for my kids. And in good weather, the outdoor activities provided a full day of good fun. The Museum is a perennial favorite among Boston-area families—if you haven’t visited it, put this family-friendly museum on your must-visit list!
What Makes the Discovery Museum So Special
The Museum sparks delight in learning, igniting curiosity and creativity in children (and adults!) as they discover science and nature and play together. It serves children ages 0–12, families, and caregivers from more than 300 cities and towns in MA and beyond, as well as schools throughout Eastern Massachusetts.
The museum’s indoor activities offer hands-on, open-ended explorations themed around water, air, light and color, making and tinkering, simple machines, sound, and math. An immersive early-learning space features a diner, ship room, train room, and other themes for the younger set and a 0–3 space for babies and their caregivers.
The Museum’s Discovery Woods offers plenty of enticing outdoor settings, including a giant, wheels-accessible treehouse, nature playscape with a climbing net, nest swing, boulder and slide hill, garden area, and trails accessing 183 acres of conservation land. The Museum also offers staff-led outdoor STEM, art, and nature-based programming throughout the year.
And, after a several-year hiatus, Discovery Museum is once again offering birthday parties. The private Community Building can accommodate a total of 45 guests for your celebration, and of course playing and learning in the Museum and outdoors in Discovery Woods is included.
Why Do Families Love It?
Families love the Museum because…well, it’s fun! The open-ended learning experiences engage kids, helping them explore the world while learning about their own interests and abilities. The permanent galleries offer a wide range of experiences, and a changing gallery space offers a new exhibit every few months. Recent changing exhibits have included a building zone, a look at the inner workings of toys, an indoor sock skating rink, an exploration of types of homes from across the world, and the Museum’s newest staff-created exhibit, Cause & Effect: What Happens If…, which offers curious contraptions for exploring scientific properties, including chain reactions, invisible links, feedback loops, and human interactions.
For families who want to explore the scientific properties featured at the Museum more deeply, there are Exploration Learning Guides in each gallery and on the website. Available in eight languages, these guides offer suggestions of things to try while in an exhibit, questions to ask, connections to real-world examples, and conversations to have on the way home from a day of learning.
The Museum offers more than 25 free events throughout the year for people with disabilities. The Especially for Me events are free for families with a member on the autism spectrum, who is deaf or hard of hearing, who is blind or low-vision, who has sensory sensitivities, or otherwise would just benefit from a more quiet museum experience. Please note that the total headcount is capped for these events, so pre-registration is required.
Activities You Can Do at Home
Discovery Museum also offers free learning explorations to try at home on its Discovery at Home webpage. Offered in eight languages, these activity ideas are themed around nature play, everyday engineering, kitchen science, art and making, and math. They use simple materials that can be found around the home or outdoors.
Planning Your Visit
There are many opportunities to visit the Museum for free or at a discount, as listed on its Ways To Save page. Free admission is offered every Friday night over the summer and the first Friday night of each month during the school year. Families with EBT, WIC, or ConnectorCare cards are eligible for $1 admission. Educators, active-duty military families, and foster families all get free admission. The Museum offers an annual family membership program, and more than 80 local libraries offer discount passes to visit the Museum.
Bring Discovery Museum to Your School
In schools, Discovery Museum offers hands-on STEM workshops called Traveling Science Workshops (TSW) for PreK to grade 8 students. These are classroom-based, not auditorium-based: every student gets a set of materials to explore. The 20+ workshop topics range widely, including bubbles, magnets, force & motion, and physical changes of matter—and each is aligned directly to MA STE Curriculum Standards. Last year TSW served nearly 54,000 students in schools in nearly every town or city in Eastern Massachusetts. Bring a Traveling Science Workshop to your school!
Recognition by Families and Respected Institutions
In 2024, the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) honored the Discovery Museum with the National Medal for Museum Service, which recognizes museums that make “significant and exceptional contributions to their community.” In 30 years, only 18 of the 106 museums earning this recognition have been children’s museums. Also in 2024, Discovery Museum won a Best of Boston® award from Boston magazine for Best Family-Friendly Activity, West.
We are fortunate to have this delightful, well-run, warm and friendly educational museum outside Boston. It’s the type of destination that bears multiple visits, so an annual family membership is well worth considering—and it’s a great place to meet up with friends and family.
Image Credits: Balls & Ramps exhibit by Jessica Cronin Photography and Discovery Treehouse by Jessica Vultaggio
