Drawing for Childen

Drawing for Childen is a free drawing program for children with many nice options. You can draw with many different pens, you can put stamps on your drawings, create all sort of text effects, and much more. The program is suitable for very young children and has a child mode especially for them. But it also provides lots of fun to older kids. It is used by hundreds of thousands of kids all over the world. The best way to see what is possible is to simply download it and install it. Remember, it is free.

Drawing for Children runs on basically any PC and any windows version (95 till Vista). For more information, see the readme file. The newest version 2.2 (dated Dec 26, 2007) adds support for different picture sizes and has a better settings form.

Frequently Asked Questions

I put the program in Child Mode but now I cannot change the settings any more, nor can I quit the program. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S (that is, hold the Ctrl, Alt and Shift key and press S) to show the settings form. Here you can change the mode again. You can also use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q to quit the program.
The pictures don't print or the prints are gray-scale.
This happens on certain (old?) printers. A work-around is the following. Click on the pair of scissors in the sketch list. Pull a box around the picture with the mouse (or around a part of the picture you want to print). The picture is now put on the clipboard. Now open another drawing program (like the standard Paint) or open Word. Use Ctrl+V to paste the picture. Print it from there.

Download

The program is available for free. Download it here and execute the downloaded file

Drawing for Children version 2.2 (1.2M)

or in the form of a zip file:

Drawing for Children version 2.2 as zip file (1.2M)

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Sebran's ABC - Free Software For Kids

It's never too early for your child to become familiar with letters and numbers. Sebran's ABC's colorful pictures, pleasant music, and gentle games teach letters, numbers, simple math, and rudiments of reading.
The program teaches using either Afrikaans, Bahasa Indonesian, Breton, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Samoan, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish, Swahili or Swedish (in Swedish, the droll zebra gracing the main screen is called "sebran").
The six simpler exercises display four possible answers. Choose the right one and it becomes a smile; an error gets a frown and a chance to try again. The How Many? counting game introduces the numbers from 1 to 9. These are used in the Add, Subtract, and Multiply matching games, which each function at two levels of difficulty. In Pick A Picture, one of four pictures matches a word; First Letter offers four possible letters completing a word. Your child can employ the skills gained in these exercises to play Memory, Word Memory, or Hangman. Finally, the ABC Rain, Letter Rain, and 1+2 Rain games help train little fingers in using the keyboard.

Sebran's ABC is freeware.
2006-09-01: Version 1.46 of Sebran was released. Includes an option to use only lower case letters, and fixes a bug in the music playback. Writes settings to the registry instead of Sebran.ini.
You can enter your own word lists to use in the Hangman game. Just create a text file in the Sebran program folder (usually C:\Program files\Sebran), called hangman.txt, where you enter one word or short phrase per line. You can use Notepad to create this file. The next time you run Sebran, this list will be used instead of the built-in lists. A maximum of 200 words or phrases can be entered.
If you have problems with the fonts not installing properly, you can download the fonts (.ttf format) for manual installation here.
Some reviews of Sebran's ABC:
"The luscious full-screen graphics, cheery music, and charming sound effects are a sure-fire way to keep young people returning to play and learn -- and they make the experience pretty pleasant for adults as well."
--ZDNet, September 2000
"Never has there been such a completely simple and special Kindergarten program. For kids learning their letters and numbers, Sebran offers a great play station for fun and exploration. Kids can play Hangman, Memory, and Raindrops, or learn math with addition, subtraction, and multiplication. This download is a great way to start younger children on a computer, and many Preschool, Kindergarten, and First Grade teachers will find it well worth their time."

Is Sebran not yet available in your native language? Click here!
There is also a desktop background (wallpaper) with Sebran

Download Sebran's ABC

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