Finnish for swimming, skating and knitting

These six words share something worth noticing. UINTI, KALASTUS, MAALAUS, LUISTELU, PYÖRÄILY and NEULOMINEN are all built from verbs — swim, fish, paint, skate, cycle, knit — turned into names for the doing of the thing. English does it with -ing; Finnish does it with a handful of endings instead. A child does not need the grammar, only the pattern: word plus tail equals an activity.

In the grid itself the tails are what give a word away. NEULOMINEN is the longest at ten letters, and its ending is the part a child's eye catches first. UINTI, at five, is the quick one. The picture list pairs each word with what it shows, so a beginner never has to work out which Finnish word belongs to the swimmer — they read, recognise, and circle.

Vocabulary about what people do is worth more than it looks, because it is the vocabulary of conversation — what did you do at the weekend, what shall we do now. Print this before a lesson on hobbies and the words are already half known by the time anyone has to say them. It sits happily as a five-minute settler at the start of a session, or as something to hand a child on a long, dull afternoon.