Six things that get off the ground, and what German calls them

A rocket, a swan, a balloon, a hawk, a dove and a ladybird: six things that leave the ground, and six German words to find among the letters. The picture list does every bit of the explaining, so your child's whole job is the search itself. BALLON is nearly the English word, short by a single letter, and it is very often the first one ringed on the page.

SCHWAN opens with SCH, three letters German treats as a single sound, much closer to the English sh than to anything with a hard c in it. Your child will meet that cluster again and again, so a word that puts it right at the front is a useful place to notice it. HABICHT, the hawk, is the least familiar of the six and the one most worth saying together beforehand.

MARIENKÄFER is eleven letters and dwarfs the rest — TAUBE, the dove, is only five. That gap helps. Let your child sweep the grid for the long word first, since a run of eleven letters is easy to see from across a table, and only then narrow down to the short ones. This suits a child who has done one or two of these already and no longer needs an adult sitting beside them to get started.