As parents who homeschool their children, we have a vast range of material we use to educate our children. Whether we use workbooks, audio visual material, or an online resource, our children are quite adept at utilizing the tools we supply them with.

We spent an incredible amount of time finding online resources and often find valuable material at the websites for some of the biggest education material companies.

This morning, while putting together some ideas for the day, my wife ran across an activity page at the Harcourt School Publishers website.

The activity she was looking at was an example of how to learn your multiplication facts through the number 10.

They provide a nice “tutorial” on using arrays to find a product and walk you through counting the rows and the number items in each row. They run into a little problem, however, when they attempt to “skip count”.

See if you can hear what they do wrong. You can also visit their activity page as well, and watch the example as you hear it.

[audio:badmath.mp3]

It sounds to me like someone needs to go back to school and learn to “skip count”. Teaching in the public schools seems to have become a little too robotic in my opinion. The question is, did she count herself as she went along or was she just a “voice actor” reading from a script?

Harcourt is one of the biggest publishers of educational material. Hopefully they don’t have the same problem with their printers as they do with their speakers.

For those of you a little slow on the uptake, when she counts by seven she should be saying, “7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, 56, 63″.

It amazes me that people still wonder why we homeschool.

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