Six French words from the cake shop, buried in a letter grid

The six words on this sheet are the ones a child would need at a French cake shop: GÂTEAU for cake, ÉCLAIR, BRETZEL for a pretzel, GAUFRE for a waffle, BISCUIT, and BAGEL. Each has a small picture beside the grid, so a child who has never seen the written form can still work out which word is which, then go looking for it among the letters.

Two of these will trip up a confident English reader. BISCUIT is spelled exactly as in English but names the cookie in the picture, and BAGEL is identical in both languages — so the search feels easy up to the moment a child says them aloud, where the French sounds are quite different. GÂTEAU and ÉCLAIR carry accent marks, printed in the grid as well as the list. GAUFRE is the least familiar of the six and usually needs saying twice.

Print it when a child is starting French vocabulary and needs the written shape of words they may only have heard. It suits a quiet ten minutes after school, or a table activity while something is baking. Read the six aloud together first, then let them hunt alone. Circling a word they recognised without any help is the moment the sheet exists for. Keep the finished sheet; a week on, the same six words read much faster.