From MELK to BRINGEBÆR: six Norwegian words off the supermarket shelf

A shopping trip in Norwegian: milk, ham, cake, pie, a plum and a raspberry, each drawn as a picture and each buried in the grid as a word. Your child matches the picture to the word and rings it. These are nouns that surface whenever anybody talks about a meal, so they earn a place among a beginner's first hundred words more honestly than most vocabulary does.

MELK sits close enough to milk that it is usually circled first, and PAI is simply pie written the way a Norwegian would say it. BRINGEBÆR is the challenge: nine letters, made of bringe and bær, the word for berry, and carrying the letter æ that English gave up centuries ago. Show your child that æ before they start and the word stops looking impossible.

Take it to the kitchen table before a shop and name a few things out of the cupboard as you go. Children hold on to food words quickly because they use them daily, and a word met at breakfast and again in a grid tends to stay put. If SKINKE or PLOMME refuses to stick, leave it and come back — a second pass a week later usually settles it. KAKE, meanwhile, tends to need no help at all from anybody.