Dutch words for sweet things — find all six

Read the word list on this sheet aloud and a child who has never met Dutch will still work out most of it. BROWNIE, PUDDING and MACARON are spelled exactly as in English. WAFEL is a waffle short of one letter, and LOLLY is a lollipop cut in half. Only APPELTAART needs any thought — appel plus taart, apple plus tart — and the picture gives it away anyway.

That near-transparency is the point rather than a weakness. A first encounter with a foreign alphabet on the page goes far better when the child can already half-read it, and hunting six recognisable words through a letter grid builds the scanning habit without any of the discouragement. By the time APPELTAART is circled, your child has read a ten-letter Dutch compound and thought nothing of it.

It suits a child who is nervous about the whole idea of another language, and it suits a wet Saturday. Print it, hand over a pencil, and let the pictures do the teaching. If it lands well, bake something afterwards and use the Dutch name while you do — a wafel eaten is a wafel remembered. Nothing here is timed and nothing is scored, so a child who wants to sit with the grid for half an hour is welcome to.