Things to Do in Little Rock

Inside The Wonder Place’s 5,700 square-foot indoor play space, colored balls and scarves shoot through spiraling tubes. Stuffed animals await vaccinations in the vet's office, and tables covered in water and sand become interactive landscapes. The playhouse's supervising staffers encourage their visitors, generally aged 8 and younger, to explore freely as they engage in imaginative play.

Kids slip down slides and scale a rock-climbing wall at the tree house, and build towers and obstacle courses for toy balls using square blocks and ramps at Wonder Works. A child-sized stage lets them perform their own plays or reenact Hamlet with puppets using costumes and set pieces, and an art area sets them loose with a menagerie of art supplies. Infants and toddlers frolic in a designated play area, filled with smaller play structures and toys. While kids can make pretend meals using pretend produce and haggle with pretend cashiers at the River Market and Cafe, there's also a real, health-focused vending machine. An onsite gift shop peddles educational toys and puzzles from brands such as eeboo, Melissa & Doug, and Manhattan Toy.

Profiled in the Arkansas Times and on THV, Rock Town Distillery crafts small-batch artisan spirits using Arkansas materials. Local red winter wheat transform into vodka and gin, corn and wheat become the award-winning clear Arkansas Lightning, and charred white-oak barrels grown from Arkansasian barrel trees cradle young bourbon as it ages. Each Saturday, the distillery hosts warehouse tours, complete with the grain-to-bottle production story of each spirit and tastings of all liquors at the end.

At Arkansas Skatium, visitors don ice or roller skates to indulge in family-friendly, frictionless fun atop spacious rinks. During group ice-skating classes, certified instructors show bladers aged 5 and older the fundamentals of gliding before letting them fan across the ice to work through new maneuvers. When the clock strikes 10 p.m., the rink morphs into a broomball stadium where up to 25 athletes take to the ice for sneaker-clad fun.

Arkansas Skatium's snack bar vends sodas, cappuccinos, pizza, and funnel cake to those tuckered out from eight-wheeled and single-bladed maneuvers. The ProShop sells all manner of gliding gear and houses a repair shop for skates dulled by nervous biting before hockey games.