Six birds you might actually spot, and their German names

Six birds sit in the picture strip on this sheet, and their German names are hidden in the grid below. A magpie is an ELSTER; the swallow that nests under the eaves is a SCHWALBE. A child works picture by picture, decides which name belongs to which bird, then hunts the letters until the word appears in a straight line and can be ringed.

The pictures are the reason this counts as language practice rather than letter-spotting. Your child has to hold a meaning while searching, so REIHER stops being a shape and starts meaning heron. HUHN, at four letters, slips easily among the filler; BLAUHÄHER is the long one, and the Ä in the middle is worth pointing out, since German writes it with two dots and it sounds nothing like a plain A.

Print it before a walk or a visit to a pond and the words have somewhere to land: name the bird in German when one turns up. Children often circle the first letters of WACHTEL and stop, so agree beforehand that a word only counts when the whole of it is ringed. The answers sit on the second page if you want to check together afterwards, and six words is a short enough session that a reluctant child will usually see it through.