Midtown East

Along with the mild weather comes a fresh crop of outdoor festivals, street fairs and carnivals, big annual favorites like two of our April Go List picks, the Tribeca Family Festival Street Fair and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Cherry Blossom Festival, as well as smaller community happenings.

These spring fests are a great way to entertain your family for just a few bucks—sometimes even for FREE. And the activities are really diverse: Introduce the kids to old-fashioned games, celebrate planet Earth, chow down on homemade treats or watch live performances by kiddie bands, puppet troupes and more. Plus, these events aren't just fun, they foster community by bringing folks together to support a school, playground, cultural institution or common cause.

Festival season doesn't kick off until this weekend but you can start planning right now. Here are 12 awesome events to put in your April calendar.

Everyone feels at least a wee bit Irish around St. Patrick’s Day, especially here in NYC, where we have a large population of Irish folk. If your days of celebrating till you're green around the gills are a distant memory, don’t worry: There are plenty of truly kid-friendly ways to mark St. Patrick's Day throughout the month.

This year, St. Patrick's Day falls on Sunday, March 17 but the festivities begin this coming weekend with processions and parties that tend to be mellower and more family oriented than Manhattan's big parade. In addition to St. Patrick's Day parades in all five boroughs (Queens and Brooklyn actually have two each!), there are more subdued ways for families to celebrate, like step-dancing and bagpipe performances, Gaelic workshops, film festivals and a leprechaun hunt.

Here are our favorite ways to celebrate Irish culture and St. Patrick’s Day with kids in New York City. Sláinte!

Your kids are intimately familiar with all of the different Angry Birds and their powers, and know exactly where to Cut the Rope to feed the little monster. But can they name all four of the ghosts in Pac-Man? Doubtful... but we bet you can! (Say it with me: Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde). Since today's kids are used to touch screen games (or games that require no touching at all), getting the chance to jerk around joystick on a vintage video game console is a real novelty. Trouble is, where do you find those these days? Why, in a museum of course.

The Museum of the Moving Image and the Museum of Modern Art have both amassed old-school arcade video game collections, and you can actually play many of them in two new exhibits. And if you worry that a museum isn't the optimal setting for game playing (which often involves a lot of whooping and cheering), we've also found a handful of old-fashioned family-friendly arcades (and no, not one is a Chuck E. Cheese's or Dave & Buster's).