Learn six Dutch colours by hunting for them

Colours make an unusually good first set of Dutch words, because a child can practise them against anything in the room. This sheet hides six of them: BLAUW, GROEN, ROZE, GRIJS, PAARS and BEIGE. Each one has a coloured swatch beside the grid, so the clue needs no reading at all, and the whole job is to find the word among the letters and ring it.

Three of the six half-translate themselves. BLAUW and GROEN are close enough to blue and green that most children guess them on sight, and BEIGE is the same word in both languages. PAARS is the outlier — nothing in English resembles it, so purple is the one that will need a second and third meeting. ROZE and GRIJS sit somewhere in between, familiar enough to hold on to after a couple of goes.

Use it as a five-minute starter, then send your child round the house naming what they find: the grijs of the pavement, the groen of a plant pot. Colour words are adjectives, so they will turn up in Dutch sentences long before most nouns do, which makes them a sensible early investment. Print it as often as you like; the grid is the same, but the finding gets quicker each time.