Hunt six Dutch sea creatures through a grid of letters

The hardest word on this sheet is also the shortest. ROG, the ray, is three letters long, which means it hides almost anywhere — inside a longer string, at the ragged edge of a row, easy to skim straight past. The other five are DOLFIJN, CLOWNVIS, GARNAAL, ZEEKOE and KWAL, each drawn on the picture list so a child knows exactly what is being looked for before any searching starts.

Two of these words explain themselves once you take them apart. CLOWNVIS is a clown-fish with the halves in the same order as English, and ZEEKOE is a sea-cow, which is what the manatee has been called in several languages for centuries. Children rather enjoy the second one; it is a picture inside a word. GARNAAL, the shrimp, offers no such shortcut and simply has to be learnt.

Use it alongside anything to do with the sea — an aquarium morning, a rock-pool walk, a book about whales — while the pictures are still fresh. A child who has watched a jellyfish drift past the glass will hold on to KWAL far better than one meeting the word cold on paper. Reading the six found words aloud at the end takes a minute and turns circled shapes into words a child can actually say.