Turkey, harvest and autumn — in Dutch, on one page

A Thanksgiving lesson is a good place to put a second language, because everything on the table already has a name the children know. This sheet gives them six of those names in Dutch and hides them in a grid. KALKOEN is the turkey. OOGST is the harvest. HERFST is autumn, the season the whole holiday sits inside, and it is worth pointing to first, since it turns up far more often than the rest.

The pictures do the translating. Each Dutch word is printed under the thing it names, so the child is never decoding blind; the work is scanning rows and columns until the letters line up. HOOIBERG rewards a closer look — hooi is hay and berg is mountain, so a haystack is literally a hay-mountain. CRANBERRY is the same word in both languages and is usually the first one circled.

It suits a mixed group, because a child who cannot yet read confidently in English can still succeed here: the shapes of the letters are the whole task. Expect BROOD to cause a pause, since it looks English and means bread. Print one each, or one between two and let them argue about who spotted what. Answers are on the second page for whoever needs them.