Find the animals: French names hidden among the letters

A child with a handful of French animal words usually knows CHAT first, and it is the shortest thing on this sheet — four letters, quickly found, a good place to begin. The other five take longer. CHEVAL, CANARD, COCHON, MANCHOT and KOALA lie across the rows and down the columns, each with a picture beside it on the word list, so nobody has to guess which animal is meant.

Say them aloud after the circling, because here French spelling and French sound part company. The CH that opens CHAT and CHEVAL is the sh of shoe, not the ch of chair, and the last consonants of CANARD and MANCHOT stay silent — the D and the T are written but never spoken. Hunting for letters that will not be heard feels odd, and saying the word settles it.

MANCHOT is the one to explain. It is the French for penguin and looks nothing like it, so a child cannot reason their way there; they simply have to learn it, which is what the picture is for. KOALA, by contrast, is a gift, spelled the same in both languages. Print it for a quiet ten minutes, or use it to warm up before an animals lesson; a second run a week later is about recognising the words quickly rather than finding them.