Boats, shells and driftwood — six Finnish words to find

VENE and PURJEVENE are on this sheet together, and that is the whole lesson in miniature. One is a boat. The other is the same boat with purje, a sail, fixed to the front of the word. Finnish builds nearly everything this way, and a child who spots VENE living inside the longer word has understood something real about how the language works — not just found two answers.

It also means the circling has to be careful. Ringing the last four letters of PURJEVENE and calling it VENE is the commonest slip on a sheet like this, so check both against the printed list. AJOPUU brings the same idea back — a wood that drifts — while SIMPUKKA, SNORKKELI and JÄÄTELÖ are simply words to meet, one shell, one snorkel and one ice cream at a time.

Summer vocabulary earns its keep in the weeks before a holiday, when a child has a reason to want the words. Print it for the last lesson of term, or for the ferry, or for a wet afternoon when the beach is off. Nobody needs Finnish to supervise it: the pictures say what each word means. Work at whatever pace suits; there is no wrong number of words to find in one sitting.