The quieter pets: six Finnish words to track down

There is no cat and no dog on this sheet, which surprises most children who pick it up. The six Finnish words tucked into the letters belong instead to the smaller, stranger household animals: HIIRI a mouse, KILPIKONNA a tortoise, FRETTI a ferret, LISKO a lizard, PEIPPO a finch and SAMMAKKO a frog. A drawing sits beside each in the list, so the child is matching picture to word rather than translating anything.

KILPIKONNA rewards a second look. It is built from kilpi, a shield, and konna, a toad — a shield-toad, which is a fair enough description of a tortoise. Saying that out loud once tends to fix the word for good. The rest are short and doubled: FRETTI, PEIPPO and SAMMAKKO each carry a doubled consonant in the middle, and hearing the tiny pause where the double falls helps a child spell them as well as find them.

Use it as a settling task at the start of a session, or hand it to the child who keeps asking what their guinea pig would be called in Finnish. An adult needs no Finnish at all to help here: read the letters out in order and the pronunciation comes out very nearly right, because the spelling system barely deviates. The circling can stop and start as often as a child needs it to.