How We Choose, Check, and Update Our Content

1. How We Choose

Every guide starts from a real classroom or kitchen-table moment: a letter of the week, a show and tell day, a child stuck on a sound. Within a topic, we choose items and activities against three tests:

• Letter and sound accuracy. The item must genuinely start with (or contain) the sound being taught, checked against standard phonics sequences and pronouncing dictionaries.
• Classroom practicality. A real child must be able to carry it, hold it up, and say one true sentence about it in under a minute.
• Age fit. Content is written for preschool through second grade. If an idea only works for older children, it does not go in.

2. Safety Screening

Show and tell items pass the same rules we publish in our guide to what not to bring to show and tell: no toy weapons, no loose coins, buttons, marbles, or other small choking hazards, and no nuts or loose seeds where classroom allergy policies apply. Food items carry a note to check the school's food policy first. These are editorial suggestions — your school's own rules always win.

3. How We Check Facts

• Product and curriculum facts (features, pricing, what's included) come from the maker's official pages and press releases, and the page shows the date we checked. Prices are labeled with their check date and a reminder to verify on the official site, because prices change.
• Word lists (for example, sight-word and vocabulary pages) are built from published public word lists such as Dolch and Fry, and say so on the page.
• No invented numbers. If we cannot verify a statistic, we do not print one. Where a number comes from a third-party review or study, the source is named next to it.
• Worksheets match their descriptions. Every printable pack's description is checked against the actual PDF, page by page, before it is published or changed.

4. First-Hand Experience, Honestly Labeled

We do not claim testing we have not done. Every review states its research basis on the page — which sources were checked and when. When we buy and use a product ourselves (bought at retail, like any reader), hands-on notes are labeled as ours and dated, and the review's research note is updated to match. Reader experiences we quote are attributed to where they were published; we never present other people's words as our own testing.

5. AI Assistance

Some drafts and some original songs and illustrations on this site are produced with AI tools. AI-generated songs and images are labeled on the page where they appear. Every page — AI-assisted or not — goes through the same human editorial check against the standards on this page before it is published, and factual claims are verified against sources, not generated from memory.

6. Affiliate Independence

One page on this site (our Hooked on Phonics review) contains affiliate links, disclosed at the top of that page and in our Disclosure Statement. Affiliate relationships never change a verdict: drawbacks of partner products are listed as plainly as anyone else's, and pages without affiliate links follow exactly the same standards.

7. Corrections and Updates

Pages show a "Last updated" date. If you spot an error — a wrong fact, a stale price, a broken file — email info@showandtellletter.com and we will check it against the source and correct the page. Material corrections are reflected in the page's updated date. Our Privacy Policy explains what data the site does and does not collect.

8. What We Don't Do

• No paid placements: nobody can pay to be recommended here.
• No fabricated testimonials, reviews, or "studies show" claims.
• No copied text or images from other publishers: wording here is written for this site, and illustrations are our own, licensed, or labeled AI-generated.
• No data invented to fill a gap: if a table cell has no verified figure, it stays empty and says why.