What to do and see with kids on a family vacation in Yekaterinburg and Sverdlovsk Region, Russia

Play the drums and Vietnamese hand-rattles, listen to an old record player, go for a ride on a flying carpet, find out exactly how nuclear power station equipment works, feed a kangaroo and a raccoon, check out an ancient wooden icon, and hope on a roller coaster or a water ride – you and your child can do all this and much, much more in Yekaterinburg.

 

Kids Museums in Yekaterinburg

At the Ural 20^th Century Literary Life Museum, they have set up tours for children in magical rooms. In the Ural Stories Museum, a journey begins flying on a magic carpet past the stories of Bazhova and other authors. At the Yekaterinburg Mystery Museum visitors find out all about urban legends of mythical characters like Daiko the Snake as well as the mysteries of various famous writers, such as Bazhova, Pushkin, Voltyer, and more. Also, don’t forget about the Ural Science Fiction Museum where a trip on a space ship and a chance to visit a microcosm await children along with famous Yekaterinburg writers and artists.   

 

 

There are frequent family events going on in the city in the apartment museums of various famous Ural writers. At the Mamin Sibiryak House Museum, they have literature and music events and at the Reshyotnikov House – smithcraft workshops. A family show called The Silver Hoof is performed every Sunday as well at the Bazhov House Museum.

Hiding in a majestic hut is doll and children’s literature museum Wonderland. Presented on the shelves is a collection of old dolls and toys in traditional Japanese, African, American, and Mexican attire. They tell you all about all the toys at their interactive and themed tours that they offer and at inside the museum itself is their own puppet theater called Buratino.

At the Yekaterinburg Natural History Museum and its branches, children are introduced to the culture, history, and geography of the Sverdlovsk Region. They tell you about various pagan wooden icons, Russia’s acquisition of the region, and the mining industry there at the Ural History and Archeology Museum.

 

 

You can find ten dioramas of climactic zones, a huge malachite block, and the skeleton of the oldest crocodile in the world at the Nature Museum. At the Radio Museum you get the chance to listen to an old record player and the signals of a retro receiver, as well as attend a “star” movie in the sphere shaped hall of the Yekaterinburg Planetarium. 

Assembled at the Gamayun National Art Museum is a whole collection of sewn pictures, traditional toys, patchwork carpets, lacework, bead decorations, and trays with paintings on them. You can come by and observe the work of such artists at the Patchwork Studio and attend painting and stonework workshops. For those interested in making talismans, “likhomankas”, or “kon-ogon” horse dolls, they hold workshops where you’ll learn to do so by hand.   

Galileo Park of Wonders invites you to visit their gravity room, find your way through a fun house, and bravely traverse a fear museum. At the interactive exhibits, children and adults will be able to test their reaction time and balance, the span of their arms, and go for a ride on the “quick slim device”. In the Ames room, you get to look through a wall and watch a child outgrows his parents literally right before your eyes.

 

 

At the museum theater called Drum House, they do different themed tours. In Space room flashing in the dark, children get to listen to the sounds of faraway planets and play instruments that make an unusual sound. They do workshops on how to play the jamba drums in the Africa Room, Russian traditional instruments in the Slavic Chamber, and Vietnamese wooden frogs – in the Eastern Nook. While sitting on a carpet in a Mongolian nomad tent, you are welcome to sip some tea and try to play on the singing cups from Tibet as well as Indian temple bells.    

At the Atomic Energy Information Center they offer introducing schoolchildren to atomic energy devices. Using contemporary apparatuses and visual effects, they send children off onto atomic icebreakers, to Antarctica and tropical jungles, 400 meters below ground, and all the way out to space – to the moon and the Sun. At an interactive lesson, they give guests everything they need to put together an atomic reactor model.

 

 

You should really consider taking your kids to at least one of Yekaterinburg’s technology museums. For example, at the Sverdlovsk Railroad Museum you can man the chair of an engineer and watch trains course along a miniature railroad. Presented at the Public Transit History Museum are some cars that used to be part of old street trains buses. Also on Fridays at the restored studio called Raevsky 13 an exhibition opens up with 30 retro motorcycles. 

For you football lovers, they do tours at Central Stadium where the Sports History Museum opened up in 2013. Children are taken to announcers’ booths and areas where footballers stretch before games and at the end of the tour everybody gets to feel like a star as the cross through the field right into the locker rooms through a special corridor.  

 

 

Kids Theaters in Yekaterinburg 

They do shows for children and adults alike at the Yekaterinburg Puppet Theater. For smaller children, more suitable shows would be Stories of the Cow from the Sky or the story of the curious scientist “Why-oh-why”. A little bit older kids will enjoy watching Morozko; The Story of the Longest Worm; and scenes based on books written by Bazhova, Mamin-Sibiryak, and Andersen. For teenagers and adults they do shows there based on the works of Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Chekhov. 

They also have plays for small children between the age of 2 and 4 at the Buratino Museum Puppet Theater. The shows there are puppet-themed, but they do plays as well based on the stories of Russian writers, such as Silver Hoof by Bazhov and Golden Fish by Pushkin. 

 

 

They perform kids shows The Ballade of the Little Tow Truck and Uncle Rimus’ Tales for children between the ages of 1 and four years old at Sharmanka Theater. They also do musicals for school-age kids, such as the Bremen Quarter, Snow White, and Alice and Wonderland. The artists of this theater even organize out-of-house interactive shows too.  

There are performances for children about Mary Poppins, the Sultan Czar, Babka-Yozhka, and Domovyoshka as well at the Sverdlovsk Academic Drama Theater. Schoolchildren are also invited to check out comedies Pygmalion, Balzaminov’s Wedding, as well as more serious shows, such as Cherry Garden, The Master and Margarita, and Romeo and Juliet.   

At the Youth Theater you can choose the age-appropriate performance of your liking. There they perform “kiddie” shows like Konyok-Gorbunok and the Adventures of Chipollino as well as shows for schoolchildren, such as Miss Peasant and the Shameless Offenders. Most appropriate for the whole family would be modern performances, such as At the Ark at Eight and Oscar and the Lady in Pink. 

Included in the repertoire of Kolyada Theater are over 10 kids shows: Finest the Brave Falcon, Cinderella, Carlson is Back, and more. Their “adult” repertoire features a lot of plays suitable for schoolchildren like The Inspector, Boris Godunov, and King Lear.  

 

 

You should consider taking your whole family to the Opera and Ballet Theater. Both children and adults would enjoy watching dancing performances, such as The Nutcracker, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and Swan Lake as well as opera shows like Hansel and Gretel, The Flying Dutchman, and Love for Three Oranges.

The new concert hall of the Kids Philharmonia was built especially for viewers under 18 years of age. Parents and children 1-2 years old are awaited at the music cycle at the Rugrats Concert and for children 3-4 years old, they’ve created a different program called 3D Rugrats. For future parents they also do a concert called Awaiting a Miracle and for schoolchildren they perform dancing and musical shows. 

 

 

Yekaterinburg Zoos

In the halls of the Yekaterinburg Zoo, you can check out monkeys, a pygmy hippo, an elephant, snakes, crocodiles, scavengers, and birds. There are over a thousand inhabitants total living at the zoo. There is also a petting zoo, which is open year round where children can come up and stroke and feed chicks, hedgehogs, guinea pigs, a pygmy horse, and a raven that was shot in a movie. 

In Crocodile Ville, they organize tours around a farm with sharp-toothed scavengers. You can feed the large crocodiles and even take a picture with the little ones. After the show they let the viewers hold snakes and lizards in their hands and pet them. 

 

 

You can see expanding balloon fish, hunting piranhas, and sharks at the Underwater Aquarium. Inhabiting the 30 aquariums with waterfalls are exotic fish, butterfly fish and clownfish and there are also rabbit and parrot cages there along with a small reptile house. Every evening, they do a feeding show for with turtles, manta rays, piranhas, and other fishes. If you would like to see the feeding shows, make sure to arrive either on Tuesday or Friday. 

You can stop by and visit a tropical jungle at the Butterfly Park. Flying right above the visitors heads are butterflies darting into the light out of their cocoons in the insectarium. Living in the Butterfly Park are gigantic cockroaches and snails, bird eating spiders, scorpions, snakes and iguanas. In the petting zoo, they let you also feed and pet an ostrich, a donkey, piglets, goatlings, guinea pigs, and ducklings. 

They invite you to come feed and please a racoon, a kangaroo, a pony, and piglets at Elkin’s Yard. The smallest inhabitants there for example are little mice and chicks that they get out and let you hold in your arms. Also in February 2014, they opened up a kids art room there with workshops and entertainment programs. 

 

 

Attractions and Nice Parks to Go for a Walk in with Your Kids in Yekaterinburg

Limpopo Water Park operates year round. It features 11 rides, some of them extreme slides like Free Fall and Black Hole, some of them triple slides like Multislide and Waterfall, then has attractions for small children like Red River and Hydrotube, Anaconda for inner tubes, and more. You can swim around in a wave pool or in the Slow River with a small current. A water slide is open for children called the Pirate Ship, as well as a shallow recreation pool, and TrumYungi play station.  

 

 

Operating in the summer time at Mayakovski Culture and Recreation Park are kids and family attraction, a wheel of fortune, and a raceway. Living in the petting zoo area are rabbits, ostriches, spotted deer, raccoons, a camel, and a pygmy pony. In the winter, people also go skiing and ice-skating in the park and in the summer time a multi-color musical fountain operates and trains start to chug along on the Kids Railroad.

You can go feed ducks and pigeons at the Dendrological Park. The park is split into two parts and in each one of them, they grown rare plants and flowers. A rose garden is scattered throughout the Dendrological Park on Pervomayskaya Street along with two ponds and the park at March 8^th Street features a nursery garden, hothouses, greenhouses, and also a fountain right in the middle. 

The oldest park in the city is Kharitonovsky Garden. In the center of the artificial pond is a little island where you can hang out and they’ve also built a play station there for kids. 

Attractions and Kids Entertainment Centers in Yekaterinburg are open every day year round. Prize games, game machines, racing games, air hockey, and labyrinths for children can be found at centers Happylon, Crazy Park, and Hippo. You can also take your kids and go bowling at Luna center.

 

 

You can find events you can take your whole family to for every day of the week in our Yekaterinburg events calendar.

 

Photos: kidsreview.ru, vk.com/muzxx, vk.com/uralmuzeum, vk.com/club17201511, vk.com/atomekb, ru.wikipedia.org, vk.com/kolyada_theatre, vk.com/albums-51542877, vk.com/krokodilville, vk.com/ekb_zoo, limpopo-park.ru, vk.com/happylon_ekat