Dutch flower names, and what they literally mean

Three of the words hidden here are built out of smaller ones, and they tell you what the flower is. BOTERBLOEM is butter-flower, the buttercup. KORENBLOEM is corn-flower. SNEEUWKLOKJE is snow-little-bell, which is exactly what a snowdrop looks like when you hold one up. LELIE, LOTUS and SERING are shorter and stand on their own. All six sit in the letter grid, beside their pictures.

Long words frighten beginners until they see the joins. Once your child notices that BOTERBLOEM is boter plus bloem, the ten letters stop being ten letters and become two words they can already handle — and bloem then turns up in every other flower name they ever meet. SNEEUWKLOKJE is the longest thing on the sheet at twelve letters, and circling it is a genuine achievement worth saying so about.

This works well in spring, next to a real vase or on a walk where a korenbloem or a sneeuwklokje might actually appear. It also works as the harder sheet in a set: the three compounds ask more of a reader than most beginner vocabulary does. Print it, give it as long as it needs, and let your child take the long words slowly. Nothing here is timed or marked.