With school now over for the summer, many parents may be looking for family-friendly activities to enjoy in the Denver area. Luckily, there more than enough options in and around the Denver Metro area, for just about any interest you or your family may have. Here is an article from Denver.org, which is filled with a number of family-fun zoo’s, museums, and other great attractions!

Kid-Friendly Denver

Kids are often tough to please – but they’ll be grinning from ear to ear whenever they’re in The Mile High City, thanks to Denver’s wide array of kid-friendly attractions. Interactive museums, incredible zoos and aquariums, wide open parks – they’re all guaranteed to please even the grouchiest young ones. Writer (and mom) Lori Midson gives you the lowdown on some of her favorites.

CITY PARK, DENVER ZOO, DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE & SCIENCE

City Park is expansive greenway boasting tennis courts, picnicking areas, playgrounds, lakes for paddling and a spectacular summer concert series.

At the eastern edge of the park sits Denver Zoo, (2300 Steele St.) where education comes alive! More than 4,300 animals await to inspire awe in your family at Denver’s most popular cultural attraction. See elephants swim, orangutans swing and hear lions roar while enjoying up-close animal experiences that provide moving connections to wildlife.

Just adjacent to the zoo is the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (2001 Colorado Blvd.), a spectacular interactive museum that explores fossils and dinosaurs, the mysteries of space at Gates Planetarium (it’s out of this world!), Egyptian mummies, the riddles of the human body, and a slew of other hands-on exhibits. The newly expanded Discovery Zone has dozens of hands-on activities for kids of all ages.

Featured Things To Do

PLATTE RIVER VALLEY, CHILDREN’S MUSEUM OF DENVER

The Platte River Valley, in the heart of the city, boasts a cornucopia of family-friendly attractions and entertainments.

At the intriguing Children’s Museum of Denver (2121 Children’s Museum Dr.), infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers can spend hours roaming through scads of educational playscapes, including a miniature “Community Market,” which allows kids to take on the roles of shopper, cashier and shopkeeper. Families will find several more thematic play areas that run the gamut from woodworking and scientific laboratories to animal exhibits and a fire station that teaches safety precautions.

Nearby, Elitch Gardens Theme & Water Park (2000 Elitch Cir.) offers exhilarating adventures galore with 53 rides, including the heart-pounding Mind Eraser, a twisted-steel rollercoaster that spins, dives, drops, rolls and races along the tracks. There is also a 10-acre swimming area, that offers slippery slides, crashing waves and lazy rivers.

Just a short walk away is the Downtown Aquarium (700 Water St.), a seaworthy spectacle of kaleidoscopic fish coupled with reptile, bird and tiger habitats. Here, amid the astounding marine life, kids can feed the stingrays, swim with the sharks, pan for gold, become a marine biologist for a day, or even spend the night in the aquarium.

While you’re in the Platte River Valley, hop aboard the Platte Valley Trolley (700 Water St.), an open-air streetcar that resembles the trolley on the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood TV show. The narrated tours provide a fascinating historical account of Denver from its Gold Rush days to the present.

DENVER ART MUSEUM

100 W. 4th Ave. Pkwy.
The Denver Art Museum offers a Just for Fun Family Center complete with games, creative, make-it-yourself craft areas and dress-up costumes. On weekends, kids can pick up a family backpack, a portable bag brimming with all sorts of artsy, educational activities.

WINGS OVER THE ROCKIES AIR & SPACE MUSEUM

7711 E. Academy Blvd. #1
At the Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum, more than 40 planes and riveting space-oriented displays occupy the sprawling space, an aviation wonderland that allows families to get up close and personal with giant bombers, fighter jets, antique planes and a search-and-rescue helicopter. The museum always has seasonal exhibits, and on the second Saturday of each month, kids can experience the electrifying buzz of climbing into the planes’ cockpits.

DINOSAUR RIDGE

16831 W. Alameda Pkwy., Morrison
While you’re not going to come across any living, breathing dinosaurs while you’re here in Denver – they’re still extinct, the last we checked – you will have ample opportunity to learn about these long-gone Colorado residents. At Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison (near Red Rocks Amphitheatre) you can touch the bones of Allosaurus and Stegosaurus at the site where important dinosaur discoveries were made in the late 1800s. See how Iguanadons walked by viewing real dinosaur footprints forever preserved in the sandstone.

MORRISON NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

501 Colorado 8, Morrison
Get a glimpse of early dinosaur discoveries from Colorado, including fossils from the first Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus ever found. Located 25 minutes west of Downtown Denver, the 3,000-square-foot Morrison Natural History Museum offers a relaxed environment that is perfect for kids of all ages to explore rocks and fossils. The exhibits and guides connect visitors with the ancient story of the Front Range. Recent local excavations have yielded famous baby dinosaur footprints that were featured in Smithsonian magazine and media outlets around the world.

THE BUTTERFLY PAVILION

6252 W. 104th Ave., Westminster
Located in Westminster, a 15-minute drive from downtown Denver, the Butterfly Pavilion is the perfect indoor refuge in which to interact with live invertebrates fluttering around a lush rainforest, or to hold Rosie, a Chilean Rose Hair tarantula, in the palm of your hand-if you dare. The Wings Over the Tropics conservatory, home to more than 1,200 flitting butterflies, moths and skippers, shipped from farms as far away as Kenya and Ecuador, makes for an exhilarating wander through the toasty conservatory, awash with lush green plants. Stop by the Shrunk! exhibit, an interactive play area buzzing with insects and giant robotic scorpions and carpenter ants that move. Inspect the information charts, and you’ll learn that beetles comprise one-fifth of all living things on Earth. Who knew?

FUN CITY FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT

9670 W. Coal Mine Ave., Littleton
This Littleton spot is a kid’s dream come true, with Laser Tag, bowling, miniature golf and a “Foam Factory” all under one roof. Whether you are looking for a place to hold a birthday party or just have a fun day out, Fun City won’t disappoint.

FREE/CHEAP ACTIVITIES

There’s no shortage of fun-filled, free – and nearly free – family activities in Denver.

On the first Tuesday of every month, the Children’s Museum of Denver (2121 Children’s Museum Dr.) hosts complimentary guided story hours and playtimes, from 4 p.m.-8 p.m.

The Denver Art Museum (100 W. 14th Ave. Pkwy.) is always free for children age six and younger, and free for all on the first Saturday of each month.

The Tattered Cover Bookstore (1628 16th St.), arguably the top independent bookseller in the country, hosts hundreds of free children’s events throughout the year, including lectures, book release parties and author appearances.

Denver is an undisputed sports paradise, and while tickets to the major sporting events don’t come cheap, in-the-know baseball fanatics purchase Colorado Rockies baseball ROCKPILE seats, which cost just $4 for adults and $1 for kids age 12 and under.

Denver International Airport, the largest airport in The United States, also just so happens to be one of the greenest in the nation as well. According to this article from Urbanful, DIA, ranks as one of the top six greenest airports in the entire country! Check out this article and see what makes DIA, so green.

Inside America’s greenest airports

The Nickel Tour: These are the most innovative and environmentally friendly airports around the U.S.

Not only is flying usually the most expensive part of traveling, it also has the highest impact on the environment. Airports themselves have been stepping up their eco-game by instituting sustainable initiatives from green building practices and energy reduction programs, to better waste management, recycling, and resource conservation. Check out what some of our “greener” airports have been up to.

San Diego International Airport (SNA) is now home to the world’s first LEEDPlatinum (the highest environmental certification possible) certified commercial airport terminal.

San Diego was the first US airport to adopt a formal sustainability policy back in 2008. In 2012, the oceanside airport, became the first in the U.S. to install LEDs on its runways, guard lights, and airfield signs.

Sustainable features include a 3.3-megawatt solar array, low-flow water fixtures that save the airport approximately 4 million gallons of water annually, drought-tolerant landscaping, energy-efficient and natural lighting (daylight-harvesting lights automatically turn down when natural light is brighter), reflective roofs, and non-toxic interior construction materials and paints.

Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) focuses sustainable efforts on conservation. The airport has 307 acres of sand dunes voluntarily set aside as a nature preserve. Native plants and animals, including the delicate El Segundo Blue Butterfly (among the first insects put on the federal endangered species list back in 1976), are thriving again as part of this restoration project. LAX created this habitat, the largest remaining coastal dune area in Southern California, with a goal of preserving the coastal buckwheat plant, which is the only source of food for the El Segundo Blue Butterfly.

Indianapolis International Airport (IND) is the granddaddy of green airports. In 2011, IND was the first airport in the U.S. to win LEED® certification for an entire terminal campus. Now, the airport is home to the largest airport-based solar farm on the planet. It is able to supply enough energy to power 3,200 homes. When fully completed by the end of the year, the IND solar farm will encompass more than 150 acres, with more than 76,000 solar panels, and generate more than 31 million kilowatt hours.

Not only does Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) have a wetlands restoration program, electric vehicle charging stations, green fleet vehicles, and anaeroponic garden for use by its restaurants, it now has the first major on-airport apiary (bee yard) in the U.S.

In 2011, the Chicago Department of Aviation (CDA) installed an apiary of 28 beehives at O’Hare, and this year it expanded to 75. With more than 1 million bees, it’s the largest apiary at any airport in the world. In the first year, the ORD bees produced 1,200 pounds of honey which is sold at the O’Hare farmer’s market in Terminal 3 and at retailers like Whole Foods. The work is done in partnership with an employment program offering valuable job experience to ex-offenders and disadvantaged people.

As one of the nation’s newest airports, Denver International Airport (DIA) was built with sustainability in mind. DIA uses natural day-lighting, a comprehensive deicing fluid collection and recycling system, pre-conditioned air supplied to aircraft parked at gates to reduce emissions, and a hydrant system for fuel deliveries to reduce the potential for spills and excessive fuel truck traffic. Denver Airport’s fourth solar array is now online, bringing the airport’s total solar generating capacity to 10 megawatts, or 16 million kilowatt-hours of electricity. That’s enough electricity to power about 2,600 typical Denver-area homes each year.

And now the airport is partnering with one of its newest restaurants, Root Down, to pilot the airport’s first commercial composting program in the concourse area. The restaurant will collect all of its organic and compostable materials which will be collected daily and taken to an off-site facility. Their hope is to get additional tenants to embrace this and other programs to reduce their overall environmental impact.

We’d be remiss to leave San Francisco International Airport (SFO) off the list. Unsurprisingly, they have a LEED Gold certified terminal, a greenhouse gas emissions reduction program, solar panels, are increasing their use of clean fuels or electric vehicles, planted 2,020 trees of over 15 different species, resulting in an estimated 121 metric tons of carbon sequestration per year, and have one of the largest recycling and composting programs in the county in which 75% of the solid waste is getting recycled.

But they also have goats.

Every year hundreds of goats are used to graze on brush as part of the airport’s unique —and environmentally friendly—approach to fire prevention. The airport owns 180-acres of undeveloped, protected land which is home to two endangered species—the San Francisco garter snake and the California red-legged frog. Since machines can’t be used, goats spend two weeks each spring munching away a firebreak on the west side of the airport to protect nearby homes from potential fires.

Images courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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Family-Friendly, Summertime Activities in Denver