Broadway Playhouse: Meredith Willson

Today’s children may not be familiar with “The Music Man,” but they might recognize some of its tunes. (Pharrell Williams has used “76 Trombones” in his work.) At this program, part of the Broadway Playhouse series at Merkin Concert Hall, which introduces classic musicals and their creators to the next generation of audiences, they can discover the music man behind “The Music Man”: Meredith Willson. Singalongs and interactive games are part of the introduction, as well as exposure to signature songs.

‘Give Me Sound!’

Hayes Greenfield has been giving sound for years, and at this program, he’s encouraging children to give it back. A jazz musician, composer and educator, Mr. Greenfield will work with young audience members — the recommended ages are 3 through 7 — in sonic activities and games, with the goal of creating a “sound sculpture” at the end of the hour. While little enthusiasts will use their natural rhythm makers — voices and bodies — instruments from home are welcome, too.

Portrait Power Family Day

The human face has captivated artists for centuries, and this event at the Jewish Museum will make it both inspiration and canvas. After exploring the exhibition “Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power” (educators will give three spotlight tours), young visitors can create headdresses and masks patterned after the African art Rubinstein collected, and sculpt pendants that evoke her jewelry. Children can also paint watercolor portraits, pose for family photos in museum-provided costumes and have their faces painted by Agostino Arts. Those not inclined to sit still can have fun, too, dancing to music by Heidi Swedberg and the Sukey Jump Band (concerts at 12:30 and 2:30 p.m.).

Family Benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

What made a samurai warrior’s sword so powerful? And just what’s inside those animal mummies in Egyptian tombs? These intriguing questions and many more will be explored at this fund-raising event, whose theme is “Metropolitan Mysteries.” Other activities — besides dining in the Temple of Dendur — will include touring the galleries, making art, and writing and interpreting secret messages based on works in the collection.

Soul on Ice Winter Skating Party

What sounds more exciting? To glide across the ice with an Olympic gold medalist or a Disney princess? Young guests will have both options at the annual Gwendolyn Simmons Soul on Ice Winter Skating Party, which benefits Figure Skating in Harlem, a nonprofit organization providing educational programs and skating instruction to underprivileged girls. Evan Lysacek, winner of a gold medal in figure skating at the 2010 Olympics, will attend, along with several of the skaters portraying princesses in Disney on Ice. The evening includes food, drink, skating and raffles.

Winter Green Festival: A Tu B’Shvat Celebration

It may be winter, but in the Jewish calendar, it is also time to celebrate the approaching spring with Tu B’Shvat, a kind of New Year’s festival honoring trees and their fruit. This event at the Museum at Eldridge Street will focus on family trees as well as physical ones. Children can enjoy a traditional Tu B’Shvat Seder, join a genealogy workshop, go on tours of the “green” restoration of the Eldridge Street Synagogue and enjoy a concert by Bash the Trash, which uses instruments made from recycled objects. (Young visitors can also create their own.)

Family Day: Korean New Year

American New Year’s celebrations are now over, but many Asian ones are just beginning. Local children can enjoy them all in the fifth CelebrAsia NYC: New Year’s Festivities for Families, a three-month festival. This weekend the focus is on Korea, where a new year is also a time to honor the past. In this event at the Korea Society, children will practice the sebae, a deep bow made for elders to convey respect and good wishes. Young visitors will also learn Korean calligraphy and brush painting, play traditional games, make crafts and listen to Korean folk tales.

‘Rapunzarella White: A Fairly Fractured Tale’

Yes, it’s fractured, but it’s also blended: In this creative musical retelling, by June Rachelson-Ospa and Daniel Neiden, Rapunzel, Cinderella and Snow White are infant triplets abducted by an ill-tempered witch. These heroines aren’t like their traditional selves — Snow White, for instance, is allergic to apples — and neither are their princes, who may be more clumsy than charming.

New Year’s Celebration: Oshogatsu

American New Year’s celebrations are now over, but many Asian ones are just beginning. Local children can enjoy them all in the fifth CelebrAsia NYC: New Year’s Festivities for Families, a three-month festival. The fun kicks off this weekend with Japan Society’s Oshogatsu, which will include taiko drumming (young people can take part in a practice session at 2 or 3 p.m.), lion dancing, rice pounding, kite making, top spinning and other traditional games.

Moona Luna

When Sandra Velasquez, lead singer of the Latin band Pistolera, gave birth to her daughter, she also had a brainchild: why not apply the group’s talents to children’s music? The result is Moona Luna, an ensemble that offers snappy Latin tunes with bilingual lyrics. At this concert, part of the Just Kidding series at Symphony Space, the band will include tunes from its second album, “Vamos, Let’s Go!”

Come Join the Band! Concert

The creators of this enterprise aren’t kidding: Come Join the Band!, an after-school program for ages 4 through 18, helps students learn musical instruments by, yes, playing in a group with experienced adult mentors. Developed by Stephen Jacobs of the Dirty Sock Funtime Band, the program will show off its talents at this free show, which will pair students with members of Mr. Jacobs’s band, the Blue Man Group and others. Audience members will be encouraged to perform, too, and help write an original song.

MAD Family Day

No one’s angry or crazy here — MAD stands for the Museum of Arts and Design, which will invite children to investigate its exhibition “New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America.” Then they can take part in workshops connected to the show, which will include weaving baskets and creating light fixtures from recycled water bottles. Among the other highlights are meeting a designer in the artist studios and watching short films from the New York International Children’s Film Festival.

Danny Weinkauf Family Concert

Danny Weinkauf plays bass and writes music for They Might Be Giants, but he’s something of a giant on his own, too. With his group the Red Pants Band, he recorded “No School Today,” an album that won a Parents’ Choice Award last year. This weekend he and the band will perform at the Jewish Museum, playing songs from his entire career.

Concert With Betsy Blachly and Henry Chapin

Folk singing has never gone out of style, and Betsy Blachly and Henry Chapin, married performers, celebrate the American vein of this tradition. Following the example set by Pete Seeger, they’ll offer both songs and stories at this concert, a benefit for Yaldaynu Preschool.

‘Lionboy’

Charlie Ashanti may not be a superhero, but he does have one extraordinary power: He can talk to cats. The hero of “Lionboy,” adapted by Marcelo Dos Santos from the science-fiction trilogy by the mother-daughter team known as Zizou Corder, Charlie is out to rescue his parents, who’ve been taken by the evil organization known as the Corporacy. The first family show from the British company Complicite, “Lionboy” uses shadow puppetry, acrobatics and African instruments to tell Charlie’s tale.

‘Click, Clack, Moo’

These dairy workers need a union. But they’re not farm employees — they’re cows. Theatreworks/USA is reviving its very funny musical adaptation of Doreen Cronin’s picture book about the members of a herd who take to typing up their workplace grievances (hence the title). With a book by Billy Aronson, who’s updated the story so that the cows’ now use a laptop; music by Brad Alexander; and lyrics by Kevin del Aguila, the show is recommended for theater (and milk) fans 4 and older.

Kids ‘N Comedy: ‘New Beginnings’ Show

The class clown gets applause, not detention, at this series, in which tween and teenage comics perform stand-up. Here they offer a show focusing on the new year and all those resolutions — the ones everyone is already breaking. The material is recommended for children 9 and older, but there’s no need to worry about appropriateness (profanity is banned) or knock-knock jokes (this crew is sophisticated).

Winter Jam: N.Y.C.’s Ultimate Snow Day

In case you’ve been forgetting what’s fun about snow, this annual festival from the city’s Department of Parks & Recreation will remind you. The free event, to be held this year in Central Park, will provide lessons and demonstrations in skiing and snowboarding, as well as opportunities to snowshoe, cross-country ski and sled. (Some activities require signed waivers and an accompanying adult if the participant is under 18.) The weather need not cooperate: Gore Mountain, one of the sponsors, will contribute plenty of artificial snow. Equipment will be supplied, too, though revelers may take their own. (Waiting lines for some events may close early.)

‘Fancy Nancy the Musical’

One of the arts’ youngest divas is returning to the McGinn/Cazale Theater this weekend. This musical from Vital Theater Company, being revived through Jan. 31, focuses on a little girl who wants everything to be fancy — especially herself. Based on the book series written by Jane O’Connor and illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser, the production explores the predicament that ensues when Nancy finds out that she hasn’t been cast as the glamorous mermaid she’d hoped to be in the coming dance show. With a book by Susan DiLallo, a score by Danny Abosch, and lyrics by both, the musical humorously follows Nancy’s attempts to cope with a most unfancy role: that of a tree.

Preservation Detectives: ‘What’s Your Dream?’

This Martin Luther King Day program explores the connections between the Jewish immigrants who worshiped at the 1887 landmark Eldridge Street Synagogue, now the Museum at Eldridge Street, and the African-Americans who took part in the civil rights movement: Both were trying to make progress in a world that had previously held them back. This free workshop, part of the museum’s Preservation Detectives series, invites children 4 to 10 to hear a reading of Kobi Yamada’s book “What Do You Do With an Idea?” and then help make a mural that celebrates both their own dreams and that of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Family Friday: Creature Cuts

What’s a tessellation of lizards? Is it anything like an exaltation of larks or a leap of leopards? Well, it might be, if all of said creatures were polygons fitting onto a plane with no gaps or overlaps. In this program at the National Museum of Mathematics, part of its Family Friday series, children will learn all about those geometric patterns, known as tessellations. Working with the computer science and math instructor Kevin Lee, they’ll create tessellation window stickers to take home.

‘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 exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image salutes his artistry with sketches, story boards, animation cels and photographs. This Saturday and on Jan. 17 and 18, the final weekend of the exhibition, the museum’s Drop-In Moving Image Studio will feature “Animation Takeover” from noon to 5 p.m., helping children older than 7 use Jones’s ideas to create their own projects, from flipbooks to short animated videos.

‘Somebody Come and Play: 45 Years of “Sesame Street” Helping Kids Grow Smarter, Stronger, and Kinder’

Sesame Street now has an additional address: the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. This new show showcases more than 250 artifacts related to the beloved preschool public television series “Sesame Street,” including set designs, original sketches for characters, scripts, storyboards, animation cels, Claymation models, videos and, of course, over 20 Muppets, among them Elmo, Zoe and Bert and Ernie. A children’s area includes “Sesame Street” books and activities.

‘A Green Dream: Design Your Own Park’

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux got to design Central Park by winning an 1858 competition. In this drop-in program at the Museum of the City of New York, which is free with museum admission, children can see how they would fare by following that same contest’s rules. First they’ll be able to compare the men’s winning design for their “Greensward,” which the museum has on display, with the park’s real map. Then they can imagine their own urban paradise.

Family Birdwatching

Winter is an ideal time to catch up with some colorful neighbors: the birds in Prospect Park. The lack of foliage makes for easy viewing, and the cold months often bring some impressive visitors, like owl species that fly south for better feeding. Every month the Prospect Park Alliance offers these free tours, which begin with a lesson in how to use binoculars. Then naturalists lead the walk, helping to identify some of the park’s 250 species of avian residents.

Just Kidding Series at Symphony Space

Flying snow, flying feet and sleight of hand will all occupy stages at Symphony Space this weekend, as the organization presents entertainment for a range of ages in its Just Kidding series. On Saturday at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., the Mermaid Theater of Nova Scotia will perform “Stella, Queen of the Snow,” a puppet production based on one of the books in the Stella and Sam series by the Canadian author Marie-Louise Gay. In it young Stella and her little brother, Sam, play in the first snowfall of winter, exploring all the fun it can offer. On Sunday, at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., “Mike Super: Magic and Illusion” features a performer who first demonstrated his talents on television, including making Ellen DeGeneres materialize in an empty box. Finally, on Sunday at 3 p.m., “Stam-Pede” offers a rollicking show of percussive dance from five troupes from around the world, including tap, Irish step and body percussion.

EcoCruises: Winter Seals and Waterbirds of New York Harbor

A lot of tourists visit New York in the winter, but some of the most interesting won’t be found in the crowds at Times Square. These two-hour cruises from New York City Audubon focus on birds that migrate to this region at this time of year, like many ducks and geese. They also visit the harbor seals that can be found around Governors, Hoffman and Swinburne Islands. (Seal behavior researchers will take part in several of the tours.) An Audubon naturalist narrates the adventures, which include complimentary hot tea and cocoa and are conducted via New York Water Taxi. Warm clothing and binoculars are recommended, as is advance purchase.

‘Jack and the Beanstalk’

Many plants grow in Central Park, so why not a beanstalk? This one will sprout indoors at the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater, which is reviving Michael Alogna’s adaptation of the classic fairy tale about Jack, the Giant (here named Milford), Dolly the Cow and the famous Golden Goose. Bruce Cannon, the theater’s artistic director, has revised the script, and a human actor will now star in the show along with the company’s hand-built marionettes.

‘Hibernator’s Den’ Family Art Project and ‘Who’s Awake?’ Family Walk

For some animal species, winter is just one long snooze. For some humans, it’s an excuse to have a pajama party. Wave Hill, the public garden in the Bronx, will combine elements of both in its family art project, “Hibernator’s Den,” which invites children to visit Wave Hill House in their pajamas, but not to sleep. Each day this weekend, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., they will make masks of hibernating creatures — bears, bats, toads and hedgehogs — or models of their dens while listening to related tales. On Sunday only, at 1 p.m., the focus shifts with the “Who’s Awake?” family walk, for children 6 and older. The naturalist Gabriel Willow will lead this trek from the Perkins Visitor Center through the grounds to discover those species whose adaptations let them weather the winter without sleeping. (Mr. Willow will also conduct two other weekend walks that are open to children 10 and older: “Nature’s Endurance,” meeting at Wave Hill House on Saturday at 9:30 a.m., about how plants and animals survive the season; and “Winter Birding,” meeting at the Perkins Visitor Center on Sunday at 9:30 a.m. All activities are free with garden admission, but the birding walk requires registration, either online or at the visitor center.)

Sugarcube: ‘Enchanted’

An inflatable, heated pop-up space at the South Street Seaport, the white rectangular Sugarcube looks a lot like its name. And what’s inside seems pretty sweet, too: a weekly series of free arts events, from Thursday through Sunday, that include workshops, performances, D.J. parties, screenings and family programs. The family offerings kick off on Thursday with a showing of “Enchanted,” the 2007 Disney film about Giselle, an animated princess who falls under a spell and suddenly finds herself emerging in Times Square as a flesh-and-blood human being. Played by Amy Adams, Giselle has to contend with both the challenges of New York and the potential for a love that isn’t just a cartoon.

MoMA Art Lab: Places and Spaces

What’s an art lab? These interactive spaces for children at the Museum of Modern Art help introduce the museum’s collection through activities related to a theme: this time it’s Places and Spaces. Young visitors can design, draw and build as they explore spaces both real and imagined — landscapes, cityscapes, seascapes — as they appear in Modern art.

‘The Greatest Pirate Holiday Spectacularrr!’

My, that Scrooge was a scurvy knave: repossessing houseboats, stealing ugly sweaters, hiding his ill-gotten gains in a litter box. You’re probably thinking that Charles Dickens must be rolling in his grave over this, and he probably is — with laughter. Presented by Off Sides Entertainment, which produced last year’s “The Greatest Pirate Story (N)ever Told,” this show combines a parody of piracy and “A Christmas Carol” with audience-assisted improvisation and a variation on the children’s fill-in-the-blank game Mad Libs. Dickens himself plays a role in the production, which you shouldn’t miss: It closes this weekend.

Three Kings Day Celebration/El Día de los Reyes Magos

In the Bible, the three kings traveled to Bethlehem to bestow gifts on the baby Jesus. In present-day Manhattan, they will journey to the Lower East Side to bestow gifts on local children. This is part of the free celebration at Teatro SEA, the Latino theater for young people, which will honor the holiday with traditional music by Los Pleneros de la 21 and Mariachi Academy of New York; an appearance by the three kings; and presents for the first 1,000 little visitors to arrive.

‘Tiny Giants’

The heroes of this film may be small, but they’re mighty in their will to survive. Inspired by the BBC television series “Hidden Kingdoms,” this new Imax movie at the American Museum of Natural History uses 3-D cameras to peer into the universes of two diminutive creatures: a forest chipmunk and a grasshopper mouse from the Arizona desert, noted for its ability to prey on scorpions. Narrated by Stephen Fry, the film allows viewers to see the world from their perspectives.

Elska

Children can take a trip to the Arctic, no snowsuits required, via this show by Elska (Shelley Wollert), a kind of Björk for young listeners who combines music, puppets and wild costumes and characters — the Goobler, the Arctic Fox — in a fanciful tale about her life on a volcanic island off the coast of Iceland. Part of Symphony Space’s Just Kidding series, the presentation will include electro-pop from her album, “Middle of Nowhere.”

‘All Aboard With Thomas and Friends’

In winter, the New York Botanical Garden becomes as much a train station as a plant-filled paradise. Although the Holiday Train Show is now over, the garden is offering one more weekend of “All Aboard With Thomas & Friends,” a mini-performance featuring Thomas the Tank Engine and Driver Sam, of storybook and television fame. Children can help the characters as they decorate the train station for a big surprise party and pose for photos with Thomas at the end of the singalong show.

Salute to Wildlife Ice Carving Week

Animals at the Bronx Zoo are rarely frozen in place, but this time of year is an exception, when artists give daily demonstrations of how they sculpt various species from blocks of ice. This year, artists will create creatures native to the tropics — though that may sound odd for an ice festival, the zoo is aiming to highlight the Wildlife Conservation Society’s efforts in the Brazilian rain forests and the Amazon River Basin — and on Sunday, visitors can vote for their favorite ice animal in several categories. The event will also include an ice play area, with a 25-foot-long rain forest canopy ice slide, and, on Monday only, at 11:30 a.m. and 1 and 2:30 p.m., story time with a visit from characters from “Arthur,” the PBS series based on Marc Brown’s books.