The French words on an autumn table, hidden among the letters

The pictures on this sheet come from an autumn table: a pumpkin, an apple, bread, cranberries. Their French names lie hidden in the letter grid, and your child's job is to find all six and circle them. CITROUILLE and CANNEBERGE are both ten letters long, so half the sheet is short work and half of it asks for real patience. The pictures carry the meaning, so no dictionary is needed before starting.

POMME and PAIN go quickly, and that matters — an early success gives a child the appetite to keep going at the longer ones. GLAND, the acorn, is the word most children want to say aloud afterwards. Encourage that. A word said as well as circled is far more likely to still be there next week. Six words is a sensible number for one sitting, and this sheet keeps to it.

Print it in late autumn, near a harvest display or a Thanksgiving table, when the pictures match what is genuinely in front of your child. It stands up perfectly well as ordinary food vocabulary for the rest of the year too. The picture list is also the answer key, so an adult need not hover over the page. Print it again in a fortnight and see which words have stayed.