An egg, a basket and a lamb, hiding in Italian

Six Italian words for the things that turn up at Easter are set into the grid: UOVO for the egg, CESTINO for the basket, AGNELLO for the lamb, GIGLIO for the lily. Your child matches each picture to its word on the list, then combs the rows and columns until those letters appear in order and draws a ring around them. Nothing has to be spelled from scratch.

UOVO is only four letters and three of them are vowels, which makes it oddly slippery — a child's eye slides straight over it. CONIGLIETTO, the bunny, is the opposite problem: eleven letters that will not fit into a short row, so it has to be tracked patiently. CARAMELLA is the sweet. The gl in GIGLIO is said rather like the middle of million. A child who checks each find against the picture list before the pencil goes down will miss fewer of them.

It suits the fortnight before Easter, when the pictures already mean something and the words can attach to a real basket on the table. There is no timer and no score anywhere on it, so it can be abandoned halfway and picked up the next day without any sense of failure. Ask afterwards which word was hardest to find. The answer is usually UOVO.