Who does what: six German job words to track down in the grid

The pictures on this sheet show people at work: a doctor, a cook, a gardener, a carpenter, an artist and a police officer. The grid hides the German name for each. ARZT is the doctor and KOCH the cook. GÄRTNER tends the garden, POLIZIST wears the uniform, KÜNSTLER makes the pictures, and ZIMMERMANN builds. Your child reads across and down until one of those words appears whole, then circles it.

Half of these words are unusually short. ARZT and KOCH are four letters each, which makes them quick to spot but also easy to skim past, since four letters can sit inside a row without drawing the eye at all. The long one behaves the other way round. ZIMMERMANN runs to ten letters, so once a child catches the opening ZIM they can follow it to the end without checking every square.

This is worth printing alongside any talk about jobs: a visit to the surgery, a question about what a neighbour does, a book about builders. Expect the umlauts to slow things down. GÄRTNER and KÜNSTLER each carry one, and a child scanning for a plain a or u will pass straight over the right square. Say every word aloud once before the hunt starts; hearing it makes the written shape easier to hold.