Spring in Dutch: six words to find in the letter grid

BIJ is three letters and means bee, which makes it the quickest find on the page and a sound place for a hesitant child to begin. The other spring words hidden here are NEST, REGEN, VLINDER, BLAD and KONIJNTJE, each of them drawn on the picture list beside the grid. Nothing has to be spelled from memory; the word is there to be matched, then tracked through the letters.

KONIJNTJE is worth stopping on. A rabbit is a konijn; add -tje and it becomes a little rabbit, a bunny. Dutch makes that small-and-fond ending do an enormous amount of work, and a child who meets it here will meet it again in dozens of words. NEST and BLAD are short and blunt by comparison, while REGEN is a close enough cousin of the English rain to be guessed.

The season does as much of the teaching as the sheet does. Print it in March or April, when there is a real VLINDER on the buddleia and actual REGEN against the window, and the words fasten themselves to things a child has only just seen. Indoors on a grey day it still works perfectly well, but outdoors first is better. Six words, no timer, and a pencil is all it asks for.