The German for crab, sandals and ice cream, waiting in a grid

This one runs from the beach to the barbecue. Your child looks at a picture — a crab, a pair of sandals, an ice cream, a hot dog — reads the German word printed with it, then goes hunting through the letters. GRILL and HOTDOG have been borrowed straight from English, which is a genuinely useful thing for a beginner to discover early on.

EISCREME repays a closer look. Its first part, EIS, is the German word for ice, and it turns up in all sorts of places once your child starts noticing it. SANDALEN takes the plural ending EN, so the word on the sheet names the pair rather than one shoe. Both come to eight letters and sit comfortably in the middle of the range, hard enough to need looking for but never hard enough to stall a search.

MARIENKÄFER, the ladybird, is the long one at eleven letters with an Ä near the end, and it is the word most children leave until last. That is fine. Let them circle the short ones first, come back to it, and read it aloud in two halves. The sheet suits the end of term or a wet afternoon in the holidays, when something quiet is more welcome than something loud.