Autumn on the table, and the German words that name it

The pictures here are the season itself — an acorn, a pumpkin, a pie, a harvest. Your child reads the German word beside each one, then searches the grid for the very same run of letters. HERBST is the word for autumn and the one to teach first: six letters, no accents, and useful in a hundred sentences long after this puzzle has been finished and filed away.

KÜRBIS and KUCHEN open the same way, with only two dots to tell their second letters apart. In a grid of scattered letters that is enough to trip a fast reader, so have your child check each find against its picture before circling anything. ERNTE, the harvest, runs to five letters and hides well among the filler, so it is very often the last one found on the page.

CRANBERRY sits on the list unchanged from English, as the names of newer foods very often do once they cross a border. EICHEL, the acorn, is the sound worth practising: its opening EI is said like the English word eye, not like ee. Read EICHEL aloud once and the rule tends to stick. This is a good sheet for late October, when the pictures happen to match whatever is lying about outside the window.