Tree names your child can hunt for, most of them familiar

Know what this one is before you print it. Five of the six words on the list — OAK, PINE, ELM, HEMLOCK and BAOBAB — are spelled exactly as an English speaker would spell them, so the hunting itself is easy and the German content of the page is genuinely thin. The sixth, PFIRSICH, is the peach, and it is the word that will actually teach your child something.

PFIRSICH is worth the whole page. It opens with PF, two letters pressed into one sound that English simply does not have: the lips close as though for a p and release into an f. Eight letters, one small hurdle, and once your child can say it they can say a good many other German words that begin the same way. It is the sound worth spending a minute on.

Use this as a first word search rather than a tenth. A child who has never done one needs to learn the mechanics — scanning left to right, then down, then checking each find against its picture — and a grid of short familiar words lets them practise that method without wrestling with the vocabulary as well. ELM and OAK are only three letters each, which is a small challenge of its own kind. Then take the list outside. Finding a real OAK or PINE to stand under gives the circled words somewhere to live.