Skip Count Kid and Friends
and
Skip Count Kid's Bible Heroes
by James R. McGhee II
Reviewed by Martha Robinson
Purchase details: Skip Count Kid and Friends and Skip Count Kid's Bible Heroes, CD with a booklet. $13 for each set. Published by Skip Count Kid. Please support HomeschoolChristian.com by buying this on CD from our Amazon affiliate link or download it from Amazon.com or I-Tunes.
James R. McGhee II, an experienced Montessori teacher, composed and recorded the Skip Count Kid audios during the 1980's. With a variety of music genres, these songs make learning skip counting fun and easy for young children.
The Skip Count Kid, the first audio created, contains ten songs, teaching skip counting from two's to ten's and one song about counting teens. The themes of tricycles, seals in the zoo, monkeys in the jungle, a skating octopus family, and so on are appealing to young children. A variety of musical styles from reggae, rock, and rap to a remake of the traditional "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" song (for counting baseball cards) expands the child's musical experience.
The song book offers Montessori activities with complete directions for making materials. For example, for "The Skip Count Kid" song counting four's, instructions for making horses and batches of horses' legs are provided. Hand movements are included for each song.
Skip Count Kid's Bible Heroes has nine songs for skip counting by twos up to tens. All of the themes surround Old Testament stories and characters including Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (threes), Daniel (fives), and Moses (tens). Again, the song booklet includes suggestions for materials to make, but not to the same level of detail as the Skip Count Kid book. Bible verses and a suggested moral or value to discuss are shown with the words to each song. Interesting line drawings that may be reproduced for coloring illustrate the booklet. Hand motions are not included with this audio.
Recommendation: Skip counting is a wonderful way to prepare children to learn multiplication. The Skip Count Kid and Friends and The Skip Count Kid's Bible Heroes audios make this process easy and fun. My children found the Bible Heroes songs to be the most appealing, but the activities and hand motions in the original Skip Count Kid and Friends make the both sets of songs a desirable possibility.
Our Experience: We listened to Skip Count Kid's Bible Heroes many times when my children were little, and I never tired of it. My oldest son is 18 now, and he can still sing all these pleasant tunes! They are help with both multiplication and Bible studies.
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