Show & Tell Day

What the day is

Show and Tell Day is observed on January 8. A child brings something from home and talks about it to the class, which is a more demanding task than it appears.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented, though the classroom practice has been standard in English-speaking primary education for generations.

What makes it valuable is a distinction researchers draw between two kinds of talk. Most of a young child's speech is contextualized: it is about what is happening now, in front of both speaker and listener, supported by pointing and shared attention. Decontextualized language is talk about something the listener cannot see, did not witness and knows nothing about, which requires the speaker to supply the missing background, sequence events in an order that makes sense, and judge what the audience already knows.

That last part is genuinely difficult, because it means modeling somebody else's state of knowledge while simultaneously talking. Show and tell sits precisely on the boundary: the object is present, which supports the child, but its story is not, which forces the harder work.

The payoff shows up later and somewhere unexpected. Children's facility with decontextualized talk in the preschool years is a reliable predictor of reading comprehension years afterward, because understanding a text is the same skill from the other side, reconstructing a world you cannot see from language alone.

One caution that thoughtful teachers manage around: unstructured show and tell can turn into a comparison of what families can afford. Setting a prompt, such as something found outdoors or something older than you are, removes that and usually produces better talk.

How to take part

• Ask a child to tell you about something you have not seen, and let them struggle through it.
• Ask questions a listener would genuinely need answered rather than questions you know the answer to.
• Set a prompt rather than leaving it open, which levels the field and sharpens the stories.
• Take a turn yourself. Adults are worse at this than they expect.
• Let the pauses sit. Filling them takes the work away from the speaker.