A sea-star is a ZEESTER: summer words a child can decode

LIMONADE is the easiest word on this sheet: an English-speaking child reads it, hesitates, then hears lemonade inside it. That small click of recognition is what the whole page is built on. Six Dutch summer words sit hidden in the letter grid — across, down and on the diagonal — and a picture of each one is printed alongside, so nobody has to guess what they are hunting for.

Not every word gives itself up so easily. SURFPLANK is surf plus plank, the board. ZEESTER is sea plus star, which is exactly what a starfish is. AARDBEI takes some staring at before it settles into strawberry. Dutch builds long words by welding short ones together, and a word search is a quiet way to meet that habit, because a child has to read every letter in order to find the word at all.

Print it in the week before a holiday, or leave it on the table with coloured pencils. Most children work through it in ten or fifteen minutes and want to say the words aloud afterwards; BARBECUE with the stress at the front sounds properly Dutch. Nothing is timed and nothing is scored. If a word will not come, hand over the answer sheet — the point is the words, not the struggle.