Long harvest words in Finnish, and how to break them apart

Two of the six words on this sheet are long enough to stop a child in their tracks. TAMMENTERHO is an acorn, and it holds tammi, the oak tree, inside it. HEINÄSUOVA is a haystack, built out of heinä, hay. Read both aloud in halves before anyone starts searching and they stop being obstacles altogether: an eleven-letter Finnish word is usually two short words holding hands.

The rest come easier. SATO is the harvest itself and only four letters long. MAISSI is maize, KURPITSA a pumpkin, PIIRAKKA a pie. Each is listed with a picture, so a child works from the drawing to the letters instead of going through English on the way. The grid runs across and down, and the job is simply to see a whole word standing there among its neighbours and ring it.

It suits a harvest display, a Thanksgiving week in an international classroom, or an autumn walk that came home with a pocketful of acorns. Ask a child to leave SATO until last — it is short, its letters are ordinary ones, and it becomes genuinely difficult once the long words have already been crossed off the list. A child who has hunted a word down tends to hold on to it rather better than one who only read it once, which is the quiet argument for the exercise.