EDITOR’S NOTE: NYC kids’ winter activities recommendations updated for Winter 2022-23!!

These are the times that try a parent’s soul — the cold, barren doldrums of winter between the New Year’s holiday and the start of spring (yeah – that’s pretty much all of winter, people). How can you keep your child entertained?

We compiled a list of several kids’ winter activities you can find around the boroughs to help you exercise your child’s body and brain.

You can also check out our friends at New York Family magazine for updated lists of seasonal events and great suggestions for other things for you and your little ones to do in the city.

Best kids’ winter activities in NYC: Skating

Let the tourists take over Rockefeller Center. Instead, start your quest for ice time by checking out NYC’s public skating rinks. Then, see what our friends at Tiny Beans recommend for skating in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Personally, we like:

Lakeside Prospect Park. This recently renovated Brooklyn skating rink features an outdoor and an indoor rink so you can have fun no matter the weather. Don’t forget to stop in at the cafe for hot chocolate.

The Rink at Winter Village in Bryant Park. This great Manhattan location always has fun going on in its Winter Village setting. Skating is free if you bring your own skates, but you do need to reserve a time. Features to rent include special penguin “Skate Aids” to rent that will help beginners under age 10 navigate, ice “bumper cars,” curling lanes and even dining igloos.

City Ice Pavilion. Hop over to Queens for this huge skating facility in Long Island City that features two NHL-size rinks. Note: helmets for novice skaters are no longer available for rental.

Best kids’ winter activities in NYC: Learning

Not all kids’ winter activities have to involve the cold. Winter is the best time to take your children to any of the scores of great historic places or museums New York City has to offer because … fewer tourists! Time Out New York Kids offers a great list of permanent kids’ exhibits at local museums. Here are some of our faves:

MOMA: The Museum of Modern Art. The “Art Card” program is part scavenger hunt and part-art history lesson that will teach and entertain your children. Also features story-time events, art classes and more for the wee ones.

The Queens Museum. Home for the most amazing scale model ever built (of New York City, of course, this recently renovated museum in Flushing is also a showcase for many contemporary and modern artists. It also holds many family workshops on Sundays.

National Museum of the American Indian. Located in lower Manhattan inside the Alexander Hamilton Customs House, which is a beautiful feat of turn-of-the-20th-century architecture, this museum teaches about Native American history and culture while also featuring special activities just for kids.

The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum’s Exploreum Hall. This 13,000 square feet of interactive exhibits is just part of this awesome complex. It offers family-friendly workshops and storytelling activities year-round. You can even sleep onboard overnight through its “Operation Slumber.”

Best kids’ winter activities in NYC: Sledding

The city’s Parks Department website actually lists popular sledding spots in all five NYC boroughs (yes, Staten Island, too). Here are some of our faves:

Central Park: Pilgrim Hill and Cedar Hill. Pilgrim Hill, accessible at 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue, has steeper hills and tends to get more crowded. Cedar Hill, between 76th and 79th streets on the east side, has two hills, one of which is less steep and thus more popular with the youngest sledders.

Inwood Hill Park. Its location at the tip of Upper Manhattan means it’s less crowded than most NYC sledding spots, but man — it’s worth the trip there with lots of space and slopes to hit.

Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. Features four hills of varying difficulty so there’s something for all riders.

You can find other sledding recommendations from Time Out New York Kids and our friends at Mommy Poppins.

Indoor play in NYC

Let the kids burn off some energy at one of these NYC indoor play spaces recommended by Tiny Beans. 

Bonus: Hit the ski, tubing slopes

New York City may not have mountains but the city is closer to the ski and tubing action than you may think.

We wrote a whole separate post about the best family-friendly skiing and tubing near NYC. Check it out!

Top photo by cottonbro via Pexels

Space. The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Everyone knows those words, just as everyone knows Star Trek. This summer The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum hosted the Star Trek Experience for four months. The exhibit closes Oct. 31, so hurry on down.

Star Trek means a lot of things to a lot of different people, so to sell an exhibit as a “Star Trek Experience” means you will get held to a high bar for doing so. Star Trek not only caters to its own fandom along with the general public, it actually caters to a way of life.

After being greeted by the Enterprise herself and receiving an introduction by a holographic Starfleet member, you travel down a hallway illustrating the shows timeline where you exit into Sick Bay.

Two beds are set up with Klingon patients. Your job, as Medical Officer, is to use the tricorder to examine them and determine what their ailment is.

This is where the experience factor came into play in the Star Trek Experience. You aren’t just looking at the displays, you are interacting with them. Visitors can sign up at the beginning to have their info transmitted to a wrist sensor so you can interact with pretty much the entire exhibition and be rated on how you did.

Each section of the Star Trek Experience has multiple consoles where you can take these easy interactive tests. Sometimes they are in the form of games, sometimes as multiple choice quizzes, but all were enjoyable.

At the finish, you will be evaluated, and it will be suggested which job in Starfleet you are best suited for: the Sciences, Navigation, Communications, Engineering, Tactical or Command.

Across from Sick Bay at Star Trek Experience is the Communications Center. Here you can learn about aliens like the Klingons, what their culture is, and how to speak their language. An interactive Photoshop feature is available as well, so you can transform yourself into a member of an alien race.

But never let it be said that straight up Star trek props aren’t interesting all on their own. The exhibit didn’t just focus on interactive games and tests, there are plenty of displays of Star Trek’s signature items on hand as well.

Having said that, and as interesting as it was to see the development of the eponymous phaser guns, it is also nice to get a chance to play a shooting game with them as well.

And so the Star Trek Experience went. You explore the different aspects of the mythology and interact with it. You map a course to an inhabitable planet. You analyze the engines and figure out how to repair problems with them. You learn how to use the transporter.

But it is all leading to the star attraction, why everyone went to the Star Trek Experience: the Bridge.

Whether you’re a casual or intimate fan, to sit in the Captain’s Chair is a desire we all share. To be the person commanding that five-year mission; to imagine yourself facing down Khan Noonian Singh; to explore new worlds and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before; that is what’s central to everything in these stories.

The Bridge in question is modeled after the version found on the NCC-1701-D, seen in the Star Trek: The Next Generation. Besides the Captain’s Chair, control stations are available for the helm, tactical officers, communications and the science officer.

But the most compelling interactive game is the Kobayashi Maru, the un-winnable simulation all captains must face, seen in both Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and in the 2009 reboot of the franchise as well.

But the Bridge exhibition was more than that. It also served to remind everyone what makes Star Trek so great. The franchise is pretty singular in not only science fiction, but all genres, in showing us what humanity can achieve if we work together. Very few imaginings can match Star Trek’s vision of a positive future for all of us.

Gene Roddenberry went far out of his way to provide the original series with a very diverse cast, which was groundbreaking at the time. Star Trek was always more than just starships and aliens, it was a commentary on society, our failings, and why we always have reason to hope to improve ourselves, and that we should always make room for this.

This was reflected in the crowd milling around. Men, women, and children of all races and creeds chatted together and played out some of their favorite scenes. The unifying message of Star Trek was plainly visible throughout the exhibit, but was especially so on the Bridge.

Once you’ve completed the Star Trek Experience, found out which aspect of Starfleet you’re best suited for, and turned in your wristband, you still aren’t quite done. Besides the awesome gift shop, one more Star Trek exhibit awaits, appropriately stationed in the Space Shuttle Enterprise’s hangar.

It’s too perfect that the fictional Enterprise spacecraft and the historical one resided on the same site for a time. So why wouldn’t the shuttle Galileo sit waiting for you under the shuttle Enterprise?

This is the real thing — the actual shuttle used in the television show back in the 1960s, preserved carefully and transported delicately to sit on the deck of an aircraft carrier housing a space shuttle on the Hudson river in New York City.

If you couldn’t feel the weight of how awesome all of that was to take in at the same time, please do check your own pulse.