Bed, chair, sofa: the room your child is sitting in, in Italian

The words hidden on this sheet name things your child can point at without leaving the room: LETTO the bed, SEDIA the chair, DIVANO the sofa, CUSCINO the cushion. That is the argument for this one in particular. Every answer has a real object attached to it a few steps away, and that is the fastest way for a new word to stop being abstract.

LETTO and SEDIA are both five letters and both tend to go quickly. CASSETTIERA, the chest of drawers, is eleven letters and will not fit along a short row, so it has to be hunted down a column or across the widest part of the grid instead. ROCKER, the rocking chair, is a word Italian has borrowed from English, and most children spot it at once. A borrowed word and two short ones give a beginner somewhere to start.

The obvious follow-up costs nothing. Walk round the house afterwards and ask for the Italian for whatever you happen to touch; four of the six live in most bedrooms. There is no score on the sheet and no timer, so it can be finished in one sitting or left half-circled on the kitchen table until somebody feels like picking it up again. Nobody is counting how long it takes.