Zoom show and tell

7 Simple Virtual Show & Tell Ideas for Kids

All parents have, for better or worse, become familiar with virtual learning lately.

Your child’s teacher is no doubt working hard to employ every activity possible that will translate well into virtual learning.

One of these activities is Show and Tell. Because each individual student can be seen by everyone else, Show and Tell is easily employed in the virtual classroom.

But what are the best Show and Tell ideas for virtual learning? It’s actually not as difficult to come up with good presentation items as you might think!

Here’s a quick list of some of the best virtual Show and Tell ideas to get your wheels turning: 

1. Favorite Item
2. Room Tour
3. Show Off Your Pet
4. Craft Display
5. Slideshow Presentation
6. Drawing
7. Object Starting With a Certain Letter or Number

And now, let’s take a closer look at each one and how you can get your little one ready for the big day.

Favorite Item

A very easy Show and Tell idea, this could be literally anything your child likes:

• a favorite food
• photo, toy
• book
• collection
• or snack.

You can be extra creative here since you’re not needing to physically carry something to the school.

If your child likes to ski, she or he can simply pan over to the skis in the corner, or maybe they really like their bed and want to show the class!

To take it a little further, have your child come up with answers to some of these questions to go along with the presentation:

• Why do you like this object?
• When did you get it? Who gave it to you?
• Is there a story behind it? Tell the story.

Room Tour

Children love to show off their bedrooms, and with virtual Show and Tell, it’s possible!

If your child would like to give their class a tour of their room, prepare by making it orderly ahead of time.

Then, write down a short list of stopping points on their tour.

They can share little stories or facts throughout the tour. It can even be staged like a wildlife or city tour.

Your child does not have to be limited to their own room.

He or she could give a tour of the living room, basement, kitchen, or even backyard (if your WiFi reaches that far).

Show Off Your Pet

A Zoom conference favorite, let your child show off his or her pet for virtual Show and Tell.

Make sure the camera angle is just right to give your child’s class a perfect view of the pet, whether it’s in a cage or sitting on the floor. 

When it’s presentation time, your child can talk about how old the pet is, a favorite memory with the pet, and how your child takes care of the pet.

If the pet does a trick, this could also be a fun time to put your pet’s talent on display.

Craft Display

Is your child a crafting fiend?

Let him or her show off their creative side by giving a Show and Tell presentation with a recent craft they made.

They can talk about what materials were needed, a step-by-step tutorial of how it was put together, how much time it took, and why they decided to do it in the first place.

They can even give a virtual tour of their crafting area or table, if they have one.

Slideshow Presentation

If you and your child can figure out the technological side of it, a slideshow presentation could be an appropriate Show and Tell activity.

One idea is displaying a family photo. Then, in each of the following slides, zoom in on one face and give some quick facts about that person.

Your child could also create a slideshow about their favorite animal, sport, or place.

You can easily make slideshows with Microsoft Office and Powerpoint, or by using Google Slides.

Drawing

When technology isn’t your strong suit, your child could simply show a drawing that they did.

Popular topics are animals, nature, places and sports.

Just have your child make the drawing ahead of time.

During the Show and Tell time, your child can point out the different parts of the picture, explaining who is who or where it is, or some facts about the contents of the drawing.

Object Starting With a Certain Letter or Number

For a child and parent that just don’t know where to start, look no further than your child’s name and age.

You can pick something that starts with the same letter as your child’s name, or has the same amount or number as your child’s age.

For example, Bill can show and tell a banana, bicycle, and/or a ball.

If he is 7, he can show 7 of his favorite toy cars.

It’s a fun little twist on an incredibly simple idea, and perfect for Zoom and virtual learning.

Wrapping Up

Virtual learning has its benefits and its challenges.

Thankfully, Show and Tell can help make kids feel like they’re back in the classroom together.

Zoom and other video chats even allow them to show off things they maybe normally couldn’t, like a pet or their room.

Just make sure the technological side of it (like the camera, screen sharing, and wireless connection) are all squared away before presentation time.

For more ideas, check out:

• Unusual Show & Tell ideas
• Show & Tell ideas for recycling
• Show & Tell ideas for animals
• Show & Tell ideas for dinosaurs
• Show & Tell ideas for the 5 senses

Hope this helps!

Show-and-tell is the best part of remote kindergarten.

Much of my 5-year-old son’s experience of virtual kindergarten can be defined by what he and his classmates do not do together. There is no hot potato. No duck, duck, goose. They never sing songs. They sit in living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms across town, at their desks, tables, and cardboard boxes. They try to identify the staccato “P” sound the teacher makes, puffing out her barely audible puffs of air. They hold white boards and pieces of paper, and try again and again to make the number three, while reciting, “Around a tree, around a tree, this is how you make the number three.” Toby often sighs and looks out the window. It can be a struggle to keep him online.

But the days when it is Toby’s turn for show-and-tell feel different. Sometimes he plans ahead, setting an object of interest next to his desk in his bedroom the night before. Occasionally, he waits to minutes before “showtime,” lifting different items from the floor of his room, studying them with an appraising gaze. Toby has shown: a fake X-ray of his hand made out of construction paper, cooking oil, and crayon; a papier-mâché volcano; and a Spider-Man doll. When he stepped away from the screen for a moment to use the bathroom, he left Spidey standing up in his place. While class went on, I remained on my stool just out of range of the camera and eyed the doll, Toby’s proxy in a skin-tight suit with molded plastic muscles. “Who is this child?” I wondered.

While much of Toby’s Zoom time with his kindergarten class is dedicated to the development of skills—and the occasional “Floor Is Lava” dance party—his teacher also sets aside two short sessions a week for the discursive, messy activity of show-and-tell. Depending on whose turn it is, the class swerves between science and sentimentality, consumerism and the category I think of as “things to cuddle with.” Although it may seem silly to watch a 5-year-old model a princess crown or get licked by her dog, the longer the pandemic goes on, the more I realize that show-and-tell has the potential to combat the soul-killing quality of the virtual classroom.

Why should show-and-tell matter so much? After all, the weekly bring-and-brag, albeit done remotely, seems to differ little from when I, as a 5-year-old in the 1980s, sat on a worn rug and held up a Cabbage Patch doll for all to see. So much else about kindergarten has changed. While I spent my mornings fingerpainting in an art corner or playing dress-up, most of my son’s education seems to be about learning to manipulate a series of interchangeable parts—moving pennies onto the squares of a ten frame, creating a chain of words that end in the letters -ox. Show-and-tell feels special.

But the history of education tells me it wasn’t always a parade of toys. As a pedagogical practice, show-and-tell has moved with the times. At its best, it offers students of all ages the opportunity to demonstrate enthusiasm and nerve, the underappreciated ability to “read a room,” all while describing an object of interest.

In 1954, a science coordinator for New York City’s public schools advocated for show-and-tell based on your “father’s occupation.” The fifth-grade daughter of a plumber might bring in “copper tubing, small Stillson wrench, solder,” for example. I like to imagine the drab postwar classroom, the dusty textbooks and newsreels run on a creaking projector, and the students’ excitement at the chance to examine real instruments from toolboxes and workrooms. After all, in a few short years the Soviets would launch Sputnik, the first human-made object to orbit the Earth, and politicians and educators would demand more science instruction for all grade levels, even kindergarten that sanctuary of “[s]ong, dance, rest and milk,” as one journalist described it. After all, Sputnik, a 184-pound aluminum sphere with four antennas that looked like “whiskers,” was probably made with a humble soldering iron, not so different from the ones found in a plumber’s case.

By 1973 the mood in schools had changed, and one educator, annoyed with a rigid approach to show-and-tell, made the case for spontaneous show-and-tell “happenings,” borrowing the word from the avant-garde art scene. Her pedagogy reflected the educational movement of the time toward “open classrooms,” where students did not sit at desks and receive direct instruction but mostly ranged about the room, free to let their interests drive learning. Sometimes a cabin built out of blocks (“It’s George Washington’s house!”) or a mouse drawn on paper might give the student an “a-ha!” moment—similar to the kind any artist might have—prompting the teacher to call the kids together to witness the fumbling efforts and newfound mastery of a friend.

Show-and-tell also offers immutable benefits. Since revealing to peers what interests us and why involves vulnerability—Will they laugh at me? Will they not like what I like?—show-and-tell has the power to prepare students for the tightrope walk that is every sustained act of expression. Even shy students, my son’s teacher tells me, can benefit from “having the stage” and time to share with others “what is special to them.” Toby’s teacher does not require students to do show-and-tell, but almost all want to, and over time she has seen how even the least confident child can grow more adept and at ease while speaking in front of the class.

Just as one student might be changed by show-and-tell, so might the group as a whole. In 2020, a team of scholars noted that over the course of a year of participating in the ritual, students seemed more masterful in their presentation, more apt to capture the interests of the class, and “interactions became more complex. ”

It can also relieve the loneliness of the remote learner. More than anything else, my son misses being a child among many. Not since Toby was a toddler has he been with me so much. Toby and I use the same computer and we draw from the same lot of human experience. Lately, our books gathered from curbside pick-up at the library tend toward geology and geography, the history of the world written in the landscape. We take drives to look at road cuts. To make up for not allowing him to attend school in person, I offer him stones and names of stones—pyrite, limestone, granite—doing what parents have always done, making experiences out of what is available. Most days it doesn’t seem like enough.

1. What, Exactly, Does Taylor Swift Mean by “Midnight”?
2. I Taught Elderly People How to Avoid Internet Scams. Then I Fell for the Oldest Trick in the Book.
3. I Asked This MacArthur Genius About Space Junk. He Changed the Way I Thought About My Place in the Universe.
4. Instagram Deleted My Account Without Warning—and Then Refused to Give Me My Pictures

From my stool somewhere near him during the hours he spends online with his class, I worry about how his social skills might atrophy. But then, Toby holds a white, palm-sized rock up to the camera of my laptop, and says, “It’s quartzite.” His teacher squints, murmurs approval, and asks for him to describe it. “It sparkles,” he says, and tries to think of the word refraction but gives up. Instead, he launches into the story of how he found it: the lonely river bank, the pile of broken rocks a rogue geologist might have left behind. He points out the stripe of dried algae down one side. Nearly out of breath with excitement, he looks at his teacher, the faces of a few of his classmates. All are silent, waiting for him to say more.

“I love that,” his teacher says finally. And somehow, after all these weeks of school, I know she means it.

After all the children have had their chance, my son’s teacher introduces three-dimensional shapes—so much physics for kindergarteners!—and asks the students what she is holding up, starting with a sphere. Toby doesn’t raise his hand. “I’m letting someone else answer,” he whispers to me. After a new friend names the shape correctly, he says loud enough for all to hear, “That looks like a plastic meteor.”

The year ahead hopefully will allow for a return to school almost like we used to know it, but for now, my son, and all the other children learning at home like him, have this—the intimacy of offering up what they love for the amusement of others. Of course, until the connection turns unstable, and someone calls out, “Hey, do-I-sound-like-a-robot?” and the kids all laugh their own robot laughs.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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