Building Number Sense at Home - Games & Strategies

Building your child’s Mathematical Mind

Subitizing

Math should not be stressful or hard.  I want to make math fun and easy for your child.  This month I want to encourage you to play games that help build your child’s ability to SUBITIZE.  I know that seems like a weird word, in fact it is kind of new to me, but all it means is the ability to know how many without counting.

For example, if you hold up 4 fingers on one hand, does your child know it is 4 without having to count each finger?  If so, that is subitizing.  When you are playing with dice and a five gets rolled, does your child know that it is 5 without having to count all the dots?

The ability to tell “how many” without having to count each individual item is a really big key to building your child’s number sense and helping them understand addition and subtraction.  However, even as adults we can’t subitize sets of items that are larger than 5, unless they arranged in a familiar pattern like dice.  We will be working on this idea throughout the school year, but I wanted to send home some fun and easy things you can do with your child so that they see math, and subitizing, outside of school.

1.    When giving your child a group of things at snack time, give them the items and say how many they are getting.  For example, give them 3 crackers and say, “Here, you get 3 crackers.  This is 3 crackers.”  This way they start to see numbers are connected to a group of objects.

2.    Fast Finger Flash - hold up a number of fingers and then hide it behind your back.  Ask them if they could tell how many fingers you were holding up.  After they get good at doing it with only fingers on one hand, move to showing fingers using both hands so they can practice subitizing up to 10.

3.    Play the old card game of “war.” Split a deck of cards in half, you get half and your child gets the other half.  Each person flips over one of their cards, whoever has the most on their card wins.  You can also play that whoever has the least on their card wins.  Most of the time, try to encourage your child not to count to tell how many, instead just look at the cards and tell who has more and who has less.