Where has GIOVE gone? Hunt down six Italian space words

This sheet carries six Italian words from the night sky, and the pictures beside the grid say which ones. GIOVE is Jupiter, TERRA is Earth, and ASTRONAUTA barely needs translating once your child says it aloud. Each word lies somewhere in the block of letters, running across or down, and the job is simply to find it and draw a ring round it. Nothing has to be spelled from scratch.

What is being practised is recognition — seeing a whole Italian word inside a crowd of letters and knowing it on sight. That is the first sort of reading anyone does in a new language, and it is worth rehearsing on words a child already half-knows. SATELLITE runs to nine letters and METEORA to seven; length helps rather than hinders, because a long unusual run stands out from the filler letters around it.

It suits a long car journey, or the quiet ten minutes after lunch when nobody wants another workbook. The word that trips children up is PIANETA: it looks near enough to 'planet' to be read at a glance and then somehow skipped in the grid. If that happens, say it together slowly — pee-ah-NEH-ta — and send them back in. There is no timer, so a slow, careful sweep costs nothing at all.