Today is the Show and Tell day of Home Education Week, hosted by Principled Discovery, when homeschooling parents get to do what all parents love to do most - brag about their children.

I’ll start with the youngest student here at South Meadow Academy, Little E, our resident pre-schooler (age 4). He just read his first book all by himself. I mean, by sounding out the words. He has been “reading” books by telling about the pictures or re-telling a story from memory for quite some time now.

The book was “Mat” from the Bob Books series, written by Bobby Lynn Maslen and illustrated by John Maslen. He has also read “Sam” and “Dot.”

(Speaking of bragging, we just scored all three collections from Costco; that’s $75 worth of books for $30. Oh, yeah!)

Little E is also learning to write, by his own initiative. Over the past few days, he has learned to write words from left-to-right and memorized how to write a few words, including his name and both of his brothers’ names (4, 5, and 6 letters).

Our fourth grader, Big E, is an accomplished and published artist. His big break came when he won an honorable mention (that’s the two winners after first place) in the Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest, in 2006, for his story Escher’s Greatest Adventure.

Then this year, he won a Crayola art contest and his work will be featured in a book being published by Crayola this spring. And he scored a Crayola prize pack, too.

Our fifth grade student, The D, is an avid and accomplished reader. He likes to read books that our youth librarian recommends from her middle and high school reading list.

Last year, on his CAT standardized test, he scored near-perfect on the reading sections, getting just one problem wrong out of 40.

So, those are some of the great accomplishments from the South Meadow Homeschool Academy student body.

Be sure to head over to Principled Discovery for the rest of Show and Tell.