Six Finnish words for jobs, hidden in one grid of letters

OPETTAJA is the Finnish word for teacher, and it is the easiest one on this sheet to spot: four syllables, all of them open, marching along in a straight line. It waits in the letter grid alongside five more Finnish job words — ARKKITEHTI, LÄÄKÄRI, ETSIVÄ, TARJOILIJA and NÄYTTELIJÄ — and every one of them is paired in the list with a small drawing of the person who does that work.

Reading a language you have only just started means noticing shapes before meanings, and this is shape practice of the plainest kind. LÄÄKÄRI, the doctor, carries two dotted vowels in a row, so a child learns to hunt for the dots as well as for the letters. ETSIVÄ, the detective, is short enough to hide almost anywhere in a busy row. Working from pictures rather than an English list keeps the Finnish word and the person joined together in a child's head.

This suits the tail end of a lesson about people and work, or a quiet ten minutes at the kitchen table. Say each word aloud before the hunting starts — Finnish is spelled as it sounds, so once a child has heard TARJOILIJA they can almost picture it. Expect NÄYTTELIJÄ to take longest; the y and the doubled t slow everybody down. No clock runs on the page, and nothing is scored.