Six French words for the dressing-up box

BAGUE is French for ring, and it is a letter shorter than you would expect a French word to be — which is exactly the sort of thing a child notices while hunting for it in a field of capitals. This sheet hides six French words among the rows and columns: BARRETTE, RUBAN, MÉDAILLE, SIFFLET, CAPE and BAGUE. A picture sits beside each word on the list, so a child who has never met the word before still knows what they are looking for.

Searching is slower than reading a list, and that slowness is the useful part. To spot MÉDAILLE a child has to hold the whole shape of it in mind while their eye travels along a row, and the shape is what stays. Two of these are near-twins of English — CAPE is spelled identically, BARRETTE almost so — while SIFFLET, meaning whistle, gives nothing away and has to be learned outright.

Print it for the ten minutes after lunch, or send it home with a child who has started French at school and needs the words to feel ordinary rather than tested. Expect the accented É in MÉDAILLE to raise a question; the accent does not change which letter you are hunting for, though it does change how the word is said. There is no timer and no score.