See, don’t Count
How many dots are in the image? It’s not a trick question! You know that there are four dots. The ability to just know this without counting is called subitising. According to the National Centre for Excellence in Mathematics (UK)
Subitising is a skill that develops instinctively in young children. When they begin to develop their understanding of number, they use visual memory and a sense of patterning to recognise amounts. Children are able to distinguish the difference between one dot or two dots at two years old. Through exposure to different numbers of objects, they build a bank of images that they can then associate with the number fact.
Did you catch that? Children can develop a visual sense of number or quantity from as early as 2 years old. Developing this skill from those very early years builds their visual perception as a foundation for later more abstract maths (i.e. the digits). With this in mind, children should be given plentiful opportunities to practice subitising in different situations. You can use physical objects and visual images and patterns to do so.
How to develop this Skill in children
A simple way to do this is to regularly ask children how many items they can see around them. “How many trees are over there?”, “how many apples are in the bowl?” The children are observing and describing what’s around them. Which child doesn’t love doing that!
Subitising with Images, Dot Patterns, etc
In addition, another good way of practising subitising is to print off some dot pattern cards. You can show a child a dot pattern for a split second and ask them how many dots they saw. You’ll be shocked at how good they get with this with very little practice. Remember, subitising is not counting. It is seeing number immediately without needing to count. Start with numbers 5 and below as these are the ones we can subitise.
Subitising and Larger numbers
We are also able to combine two or more groups of items to make bigger totals. This is known as conceptual subitising or “groupitising” So, how many dots are in the image below?
We know there are six dots in total because we can subitise the four and the two. No counting was needed.This conceptual subitising is an important gateway to children handling larger numbers. Basically, you subitise the smaller groups and then combine them for the total. This serves as a bridge to learning the foundational number facts such as the different ways you can combine two numbers to make ten.
Resources
We don’t need to buy anything for subitising – we just need objects, any objects. As children get a bit more advanced and can start forming larger numbers, the rekenrek is a tool I recommend. You can find out more about this here.
Another useful tool are ten frames. These come in various formats – I have the ten frame trays with counters which you can buy on Amazon here. I’m an Amazon Associate so I earn from qualifying purchases. Using the link costs you no extra, but will help support my work.
And dice (patterns and actual physical dice) are good tools.Learn more about on Subitising
