Packing for the beach — in Danish

Everything in this grid could go into a beach bag, or swim past one. SKOVL is a spade, SOLHAT a sun hat, PARAPLY an umbrella, STOL a chair and NET a net — and then there is DELFIN, the dolphin. Your child studies the picture, reads the Danish word printed beneath it, and searches across and down through the letters until the word appears and can be ringed.

SOLHAT is the one worth unpicking. Sol is sun and hat is hat, so the Danish name says plainly what the thing is for. NET and STOL are short enough for a very new reader to find fast, and that matters on an early sheet — a child needs one quick success before taking on PARAPLY. PARAPLY is the long one; splitting it into pa-ra-ply before they start stops it looking like a wall of letters. The pictures handle all the translating, so no dictionary comes into it.

The week before a holiday is the natural moment for this, or a summer term when the children are drawing the seaside anyway. Print it, read the six words aloud once, and let them hunt. Afterwards the words have somewhere to live: the spade in the boot of the car has a Danish name now, and so does the hat that goes with it.