Breakfast on the page, labelled in Norwegian and buried in letters

Three of these six words are free. CROISSANT and MELON are spelled in Norwegian exactly as they are in English, and MUFFINS is the English word carrying an s that Norwegian keeps even when there is only one cake on the plate. A child finds those three quickly, which is useful — it leaves attention for the three that genuinely have to be hunted.

KJEKS, the biscuit, begins with a kj that English never puts together and that Norwegians say roughly like the h in huge — worth saying aloud once so the letters have a sound attached. SMULTRING, the doughnut, is the long one at nine letters, and it ends in RING, which is exactly what the shape of a doughnut is. APPELSIN, the orange, hides its meaning entirely from an English reader, so it is the one to practise.

Food words earn their keep because they come round every morning. Print this the night before and leave it by the cereal; a child who has just found APPELSIN in a grid will notice one on the table. There is no answer to be written and no clock running, so a slow reader can take twenty minutes over the page without anyone minding, and a ring round each word is the whole of the record.