PASTA, LATTE and MELA are in there somewhere — can your child find them?

This sheet turns a shopping list into a hunt. Six Italian words sit inside the letter grid, and small pictures alongside say which ones to look for: an apple for MELA, a bottle of milk for LATTE, a mushroom for FUNGO. Your child scans a row, spots the whole word, and rings it. Nothing has to be sounded out letter by letter — recognising the shape of a word is the point.

Shopping vocabulary is a sensible place to begin with Italian, because the same handful of words comes back every week. PASTA and KIWI look almost like their English cousins, so a child collects two easy wins early. SHAMPOO is the odd one out: a borrowed word, spelled as we spell it but said the Italian way, roughly sham-poh. Say each word aloud as it is circled.

Print it before a supermarket trip and the words have somewhere to go — ask your child to spot the real MELA in the fruit aisle. Expect FUNGO to be the slowest find, since short words hide well among filler letters. If your child stalls, read the first letter aloud and let them scan for it. Ten unhurried minutes at the kitchen table is about right. Free to print, and free to print again next week.