What is Italian for icicle? It is in this grid, with five more winter words

Six winter pictures run down the side of this sheet — a woolly hat, a pair of mittens, an icicle, a pinecone, a seal and a game of hockey — and each one names an Italian word buried in the grid. Your child works from picture to word: look at the mittens, hunt for MUFFOLE, ring it. Nothing has to be decoded letter by letter, because the picture has already supplied the meaning before the search begins.

HOCKEY is the giveaway; Italian borrowed it whole and it is usually circled within seconds. GHIACCIOLO is its opposite, ten letters long, with the gh spelling that keeps an Italian g hard. Between them sit CAPPELLO, PIGNA and FOCA, all short enough for a beginner. Meeting one long word and one already-known word in the same grid is useful: it shows a child that a new language is partly strange and partly familiar.

This suits the week you dig the winter clothes out, or a table by the window when it is too cold to go outside. Watch for the moment your child stops matching letter shapes and starts recognising a whole word; with FOCA, four letters, that tends to happen on the second or third look. Nothing here is timed or marked, and you can print it again whenever the words begin to fade.