ROUGE, BLEU, JAUNE — can your child pick them out of the letters?

Down one side of the sheet sit six colour patches — red, blue, green, yellow, peach and beige. Beside them are the six French words that name them, and every one of those words is buried somewhere in the letter grid, running across or down. Your child looks at a patch, reads the French word next to it, then searches the rows until the same run of letters appears and rings it.

Colour words earn their keep faster than almost any other vocabulary, because a child can attach them to anything in the room the moment they know them. Two here are worth pausing over. PÊCHE names the colour and the fruit at once, which is exactly how English uses peach. BEIGE is spelled letter for letter as in English but sounded quite differently, so it looks familiar and still needs saying aloud.

Print it when your child has met a few colours and needs them to stick. VERT and BLEU are only four letters each, which makes them the fiddly ones — short words tuck themselves between other letters and slip past a quick scan. If your child stalls, read the word aloud together and hunt for its first letter alone. Afterwards, name a few things around the house in French using the colours they have just circled.