A French shopping basket, hidden in a grid of letters

Two of the six words on this sheet begin the same way, and it will cause an argument. LAIT is milk; LAITUE is lettuce; the first sits inside the opening of the second. A child who circles LAIT may have circled the front of LAITUE by mistake, and sorting that out — reading on to see whether a U and an E follow — teaches more careful reading than the rest of the puzzle put together.

The others are gentler. KIWI and BAGEL are spelled exactly as in English and can be found with no French at all; BROCOLI drops one of the two Cs the English spelling carries, the sort of small difference a child only notices with the word in front of them. JAMBON has to be learned outright, since ham offers no clue to it whatsoever, and it is usually the last word standing when the rest have been ringed.

Print it before a shopping trip and the words have somewhere to go: a child who circled JAMBON and LAITUE half an hour earlier will look for them at the counter. The pictures carry the meaning, so no dictionary is needed at the table. Say LAIT aloud once it is found — the T at the end is written but silent, which surprises most beginners.