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 and runs under Windows 2000, XP, Vista or Windows 7.
2011-04-04: The install program was updated to fix problems with the font installations under Windows 7
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.
Installation Tips
If you have problems with the fonts not installing properly, you can download the fonts (.ttf format) for manual installation here.
You might also find this article about changing system locale for non-unicode programs useful.
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."
--kidsdomain.com
More fun activities for kids
Poissonrouge.com - Games for Children
Starfall.com - learn to read
You can find more learning games for young kids at the kindergarten section of Educational Freeware or on the website Kids Software.
> More educational freeware for Windows...