Nine letters of TOURNESOL stretch across this garden grid

Six flowers are drawn on the sheet — a sunflower, lavender, a lotus, a cornflower, a petunia and an azalea — and each carries its French name. All six names lie in the grid, across or down, and your child's task is to find them and circle them. The pictures make the sheet workable for a child who has met French only in passing, since nothing depends on decoding an unknown word alone.

Several of these words barely change between the two languages. LOTUS is identical. PÉTUNIA and AZALÉE differ only by an accent, so a child reading them aloud will hear something they half know already. BLEUET, the cornflower, quietly carries the French word for blue inside it — worth pointing out, because noticing a small word living inside a bigger one is a habit that pays off for years.

Bring it out in spring or early summer, when the same flowers are visible in gardens and the words have something real to attach to. TOURNESOL is the giant of the page at nine letters and is nearly always circled first. The one to slow down for is LAVANDE, which looks so like lavender that children often circle six letters, stop a letter short of the end, and need sending back to check.