About 123arc

123arc is a set of free printable activity generators for parents, teachers and anyone minding a child on a rainy afternoon. Instead of a library of fixed PDFs, each page builds a new drawing in your browser: a dot to dot with the number of dots you choose, a maze at the difficulty you want, a word search from this week's spelling list, a coloring page with a child's own name in bubble letters. Click New page and you get a different one.

How the pages are made

Every generator is a small program. The dot to dot pages lay numbered dots along the outline of one of thirty pictures; the mazes are carved by an algorithm that guarantees exactly one path from start to end; the word searches place your words first and fill the gaps; the mandalas repeat petals, drops and arcs around a center with the symmetry you pick. Nothing is traced from someone else's artwork, and every page is tested by building tens of thousands of sheets and checking that each one prints and, where there is an answer key, that the key matches.

The sight word lists are the Dolch lists (pre-primer to third grade) and the first hundred words of the Fry list. The trivia, would-you-rather and scavenger hunt questions are written by us for elementary school ages. If you spot a mistake in a question or an answer key, it gets fixed.

Printing

The sheets are laid out for US Letter paper. In the print window choose Letter and 100% scale, or Save as PDF to keep a copy. A4 printers can use "Fit to page" and lose only a little margin. The paper generators (lined, graph, handwriting) print at true size when the scale is 100%.

The name

One, two, three and an arc: the numbers children learn first and the rainbow they draw over everything. The logo is those three digits in crayon under a three-color arc.