‘City Splash’

Summer in New York can feel like a concrete oven, but there’s water, water everywhere in this annual installation at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. Open during regular museum hours (weather permitting), “City Splash” invites little visitors to explore water and its properties. Activities include investigating bubbles; digging through ice for fossil reproductions; experimenting with buoyancy; and making music from containers filled with varying levels of water.

‘Great White Shark’

Seeing this new Imax film at the American Museum of Natural History may inspire fear — not for the safety of humans, but for that of sharks. Shown in both 2-D and 3-D, this documentary explores the fate of great white sharks, which have been driven to the brink of extinction by the market for shark fin soup. Filmed in waters off Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and the California coast, the work captures sharks in their habitats, including a sequence in which great whites are shown breaching in 3-D.

Back to School Jam

A new school year is exciting, especially when it’s the first one. The Brooklyn Children’s Museum invites both new pupils and returning ones to this celebration, which will include crafts, snacks, music, dancing, storytelling and the opportunity to meet a live animal. The event will also represent the start of the museum’s initiative Bright From Birth, which seeks to help its smallest visitors learn and prepare for school.

‘Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think’

No one can talk with creatures as the fictional Dr. Doolittle did, but scientists are constantly doing research to find out what’s actually going on inside the beastly brain. This is the last weekend to catch this exhibition at the New York Hall of Science, which compares human and animal cognition. The interactive displays include plastinated human and animal brains; a touch-screen monitor where visitors can observe clips of various species’ behavior and guess whether the activity is instinctive or requires thinking, and then listen to what scientists have to say about it; stations where children can try motor and memory tasks and compare their results with those of other primates; and an exhibit featuring different-sounding dog barks, where listeners can try to discern what each may be trying to convey.

Great North River Tugboat Race and Competition

Tugboats are like the Little Engines That Could, maritime style. And they show just how much they can do at this annual event from the Working Harbor Committee, which includes a tugboat parade on the Hudson River (10 a.m.), a tugboat race (10:30 a.m.), nose-to-nose pushing contests between boats (11 a.m.) and other competitions for the boats and their crews, like best vintage tug, best tatoos and best mascot. At noon, children can join in activities that include a spinach-eating contest (hey, it worked for Popeye) and line tossing.

‘Fishy Fun’

Fish that swim will become fish that fly in this family art project at Wave Hill, the public garden in the Bronx. Children can take their inspiration from the goldfish that fill the property’s Aquatic Garden. Using colorful paper bags in this drop-in workshop, they will design their own three-dimensional fish, to sail through the air and follow them home.

Tech for Tots: ‘Learning With Colors’

Sony Wonder Technology Lab doesn’t specialize only in the digital world; in this program, especially for preschoolers and kindergartners, it offers fun that’s all about mixing colors rather than tapping keys. But there’s science involved: Young participants will learn that red, yellow and blue are primary colors, and that combining them results in new hues. Then they’ll make colorful pictures as souvenirs of the day. Families who come an hour early can also enjoy a “Sesame Street” screening program drawn from “Bert and Ernie’s Great Adventures,” Claymation short films about those two best pals.

Wave Hill Programs

This public garden in the Bronx offers many ways for the youngest visitors to commune with nature, including art, storytelling and, this week, a bird walk. This Saturday and Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., at Wave Hill House, the weekend family art project, “T’s of Summer,” will involve sketching a favorite garden scene and then using fabric markers to put the image on a T-shirt. On Sunday only, at 8 a.m., children over 10 are invited to join adults in the garden’s Early Morning Bird Walk, in which the naturalist Gabriel Willow will introduce visitors to some winged early risers. On Thursday at 2 p.m., the summer’s last event in the Stories in the Garden series welcomes children ages 3 to 6 to hear tales in the verdant shade (or inside Wave Hill House if it rains). The program, “Animal Family Matters,” will be devoted to reading books about creatures and their relatives, including the P.D. Eastman classic “Are You My Mother?”

‘Monday Night Magic’

This show bills itself as the longest-running Off Broadway entertainment of its kind. (It opened in 1997.) Every Monday a different group of magicians appears (or disappears, as the case may be), offering illusions, sleight of hand and an occasional thrill, like knife throwing. The performers planned for this week are Will Shaw, Jeff Grow and Uncle Tony.

Children’s Museum of the Arts Free Art Island Outpost

This island fun doesn’t require a flight to distant shores. The Children’s Museum of the Arts is offering another summer of weekend workshops on Governors Island, exploring a variety of crafts and materials. The theme this season is “Dreamscapes,” with projects in visual arts, theater games and filmmaking, all devoted to fantasy and adventure.

MoMA Art Lab: Movement

It’s easy to think of art as monumental and fixed, but many creative works move, or at least appear to. This interactive space for children at the Museum of Modern Art is devoted to the idea of motion, whether it’s in a mobile, a moving picture, a performance or the artist’s hand applying paint. Activities in the lab relate to different works in the museum’s collection: Preschoolers can build structures incorporating movement; older children can try their hands at stop-motion animation.

‘The Gazillion Bubble Show: The Next Generation’

Children love bubbles, and this interactive show promises not just a gazillion but also some of the largest ever blown, along with light effects and lasers. The stars are the members of the Yang family: Fan and Ana Yang and their son Deni and others, who rotate as M.C.’s for the production. Audience members may even find themselves in bubbles of their own.

Family Adventures: ‘Focusing on Nature’

You can’t really see plants grow, but you can capture the experience through a technique like time-lapse photography. This program at the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden, part of the New York Botanical Garden, explores how cameras and other technology have influenced humans’ observations of the natural world. Activities will include observing and recording flowering patterns; potting sunflowers (and learning how to make a time-lapse video of one developing); and investigating early devices like the camera obscura.

‘What’s Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones’

A whole lot of great cartoons, that’s what’s up. Chuck Jones (1912-2002), for many years one of the creative geniuses at Warner Bros., helped give life and indelible personalities to sassy characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner and many more. This new exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image salutes his artistry with sketches, story boards, animation cels and photographs. Through Oct. 4, the Drop-In Moving Image Studio each Saturday, from noon to 5 p.m., will feature “Animation Takeover,” helping children older than 7 use Jones’s ideas to create their own projects, from flipbooks to short animated videos. And every Saturday and Sunday during the show’s run, at 1 p.m., the museum will present programs of Chuck Jones screenings. This weekend “‘Duck Amuck’ and Other Cartoons” will star — no surprise — Daffy, as well as a certain wiseguy rabbit.

‘Bessie’s Big Shot’

If a cow can jump over the moon, why can’t she fly on a trapeze? In this production at the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater, the title character, a cow, longs to join the circus. Based on a show that used to tour on the City Parks Foundation PuppetMobile, this theatrical adventure, by Douglas Strich, Alexander Bartenieff and Bruce Cannon, follows Bessie as she follows her dreams.

‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’

If the children of the Pevensie family could travel to the magical land of Narnia through something as simple as a wardrobe, why shouldn’t two hard-working actors be able to play them and all the characters found there? That’s what Abigail Taylor-Sansom and her husband, Rockford Sansom, who recently joined the cast, are attempting in the Off Broadway Family Theater’s first production, le Clanché du Rand’s adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s classic novel. (The run is open-ended.)

Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival

Generations of American authors have drawn inspiration from nature, and some, including Walt Whitman and Marianne Moore, have done so specifically in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. Each summer the New York Writers Coalition encourages children and teenagers to follow their example in a free six-week program of creative writing workshops in Fort Greene Park. The program culminates in this outdoor festival of readings, which features not only the young workshop participants but also adult authors. This year, the festival’s 10th, the grown-up readers will include Sapphire, Danny Simmons Jr. and Willie Perdomo.

Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival

Generations of American authors have drawn inspiration from nature, and some, including Walt Whitman and Marianne Moore, have done so specifically in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. Each summer the New York Writers Coalition encourages children and teenagers to follow their example in a free six-week program of creative writing workshops in Fort Greene Park. The program culminates in this outdoor festival of readings, which features not only the young workshop participants but also adult authors. This year, the festival’s 10th, the grown-up readers will include Sapphire, Danny Simmons Jr. and Willie Perdomo.

Family Field Days

Children are invited to have a field day — in all its meanings — at Brooklyn Bridge Park. At Pier 6, the park staff will provide equipment and guidance for all kinds of outdoor sports and activities, from old-fashioned games, like potato-sack races and freeze tag, to volleyball, basketball and soccer.