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Spare Times for Children for May 30-June 5

Young visitors may want to put on their dancing shoes before they go to the new exhibition at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. Or, on certain days, they can just make a pair there.

Fashioning tap shoes from paper, ribbon and plastic buttons is one of the rotating art workshops offered with “Jazzed! The Changing Beat of 125th Street,” which is as much a performance space as it is a show. Presented with the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, it offers a 1930s-style microphone at which little fans can scat and sing, as well as a low staircase where they can try out moves inspired by a film of Bill (Bojangles) Robinson’s signature step dance.

Professional jazz musicians swing here, too. Last Saturday and Sunday, the exhibition’s opening weekend, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem’s All-Star Band had its audience scatting, bopping and finally marching (along with the saints). The drummer LaFrae Sci will perform this Saturday at 3 and 4 p.m.; Meg Okura and the Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble will play at the same times on Sunday.

The walls serve as the show’s main canvases, illustrating the lives of major jazz figures of the Harlem Renaissance and, it’s good to see, not ignoring women. Focusing primarily on Robinson, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington (a case has two of his band members’ instruments), the exhibition also features other giants. Mary Lou Williams, it notes, composed for six different instruments; and Billie Holiday, children will be intrigued to learn, sometimes took Mister, her pet boxer, onstage. Covered with photographs, facts, quotations, sheet music and period slang, the walls function as a kind of picture book.

Museumgoers can also listen to jazz selections, like Fitzgerald’s and Holiday’s different versions of “Cheek to Cheek.” A large touch screen features a video of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra playing Ellington’s “Royal Garden Blues”; the options include zeroing in on a particular instrument’s part — you see and hear just that musician — or studying the relevant score.

While this compact show doesn’t really explore jazz’s roots in early African-American culture, or the prejudice many artists faced, it does demonstrate its impact on later performers. These include Elvis, the Beatles and Pharrell Williams, whose “Happy,” one of the recorded tunes heard, may inspire another round of dancing.

By LAUREL GRAEBER