If you’re ever in downtown Toronto, you have to visit The Royal Ontario Museum, it’s a wonderful experience for your kids. Make sure you have your comfortable shows on because you’ll have 4 floors of exhibits to go through and the special exhibit if you opt to see it.
We hit some traffic on our way down but we knew we wanted to spend a good couple of hours in this place so we arrived at about 12pm and stayed until it closed at 5:30pm. We didn’t have to rush through the exhibits but by the end I felt like I had to hurry through the Pompeii exhibit. There’s just so much to see.
The first floor is filled with Asian artifacts and my son has studied ancient history and my younger son has started to get into history as well so they were excited about this area. They mostly prefer to look at the warrior outfits and their weapons.
When you head upstairs the gems and minerals exhibit is spectacular. There’s an area in the back with different jewelry that was crafted from the stones. My son loved looking at the gold because he know it’s valuable thanks to Minecraft.
The animals and dinosaur exhibits are the best place for children. It’s filled with hands-on activities and little drawers and such for the children to pull out to look at the different specimens. This was at the perfect height for my preschooler.
My younger son has a huge love for volcanoes so he’s read a lot of books about Pompeii so he was most excited to see that exhibit. It was really well done, you got a sense of what life was like back during that time.
There’s a huge screen that replays a volcanoe erupting that he wouldn’t leave because he wanted to watch over and over again. He also put on a toga so that he could see how the people had dressed during that time.
There’s a great display to show how the archaeologists excavated the burial sites in Pompeii and how they preserved their remains as they made a cast which you can see what they produced in the last image.
We liked it so much that we returned at the end of summer, it was a wonderful and tiring experience but the kids had a wonderful time.
There’s cafe in the basement if you’re in need of refreshments but we pack our water and the kids did not stop exploring or ask to eat while we were there.
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Disclosure: I received two free tickets to the ROM but all opinions are my own or my family’s.
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