Point to your knee, then find POLVI in the grid

Six words, and every one of them is somewhere on the child doing the puzzle: SUU for mouth, POLVI for knee, OTSA for forehead, KIELI for tongue, POSKET for cheeks, and the wonderfully long KYYNÄRPÄÄ for elbow. That is what makes body vocabulary such useful early material — the meaning is never abstract, and a child can check it against themselves.

The lengths vary a great deal here, and that is useful practice. SUU is three letters and turns up almost at once; KYYNÄRPÄÄ has nine and asks a child to track a line without losing their place. POSKET carries the final -t that marks a Finnish plural, worth a passing mention, since cheeks come in a pair and the word says so.

This one works well standing up. Call a word, let everyone touch the part, then sit down and hunt for it on paper. It suits the last stretch of a lesson, or a wet afternoon at home when something quiet is wanted but nothing too demanding. There is no clock on the sheet and nothing to score; a child who finds four and stops has still met six new words. Keep it afterwards, because body words come back in every early Finnish unit, and a second pass a fortnight later takes half the time.