‘Don’t they know Columbus never landed in America?’: Third-graders found error in their workbook. Here’s what they did about it.

Third-grade students at a school in New York were using a workbook created by an international publishing company when they noticed that it had incorrect information about Christopher Columbus.

The Math in Focus workbook said in a math problem that Columbus landed in America in 1492. The students at Valleyview Elementary School in Oneonta knew that wasn’t true — and they wanted the publisher to fix the error.

It took months — and an online petition, in which the students wrote, “We think they are ignoring us because we are kids” — but the students won.

Historians say that Columbus never set foot on the North American continent, although he did explore the coasts of South and North America. He also landed on several Caribbean islands now called the Bahamas, as well as on an island now known as Hispaniola. Historians also think the Norse explorer Leif Erickson reached Canada as many as 500 years before Columbus was even born.