Six Danish farm words hidden in one grid

Six Danish words are buried in this grid, and each one is pictured beside it: HANE is the rooster, ÆSEL the donkey, KAT the cat, KYLLING the chick, FÅR the sheep and AND the duck. The pictures do the translating, so no dictionary is needed. Your child looks at a picture, reads the Danish word printed with it, then scans across and down the letters until that same run of letters appears.

Three of the six are very short — KAT, FÅR and AND — which is a kindness to someone reading Danish for the first time. They turn up quickly, and that early success carries a child through the longer hunt for KYLLING. Two letters here belong to Danish and not to English: the Æ in ÆSEL and the Å in FÅR. Point them out before your child starts, or let the grid teach them; either way they soon stop looking strange.

This suits a quiet ten minutes at the end of a language session, or a Saturday morning at the kitchen table. Say the six words aloud together first, because Danish is spoken more softly than it is written — KAT sounds much like the English cat, while FÅR comes out closer to 'for'. Then hand the sheet over and leave your child to it. Nothing is timed and nothing is marked.