I’m Christina Tondevold, The Recovering Traditionalist, and today we’re going to take a look at subitizing in mathematical foundation in our quest to build our math minds so we can build the math minds of our kiddos.

Watch the video or read the transcript below:

What is Subitizing

So first off, let’s start with what is subitizing? I don’t know if you just heard that. It’s my kids. The joys of being home with the kids. So what is subitizing? Subitizing is the ability to know how many without counting. So if you go like this, and your kids or students can tell you instantly that it’s 3, that’s subitizing, versus a kid who needs to count 1 by 1 by 1. Now counting 1 by 1 is a foundational piece as well. Counting is super important. But subitizing allows kids to be able to see groupings, and those groupings are really foundational as they start to do operations like add, subtract, multiply, and divide. 

It’s the same thing when kids are learning to read. When we first teach kids to learn to read, they do it in isolation. C-A-T. And then they put that together to make cat. It’s the same thing as 1, 2, 3, that’s 3. But eventually, we don’t want them saying “C-A-T,” and having to sound it all out the whole way. Like for catnap, you don’t want them to sound out “c-a-t-n-a-p.” You want them to see the chunks. Cat-nap.

Why is Subitizing Important

So in mathematics, what that looks like is let’s say they’re adding 8 + 7. Well, if a kid doesn’t instantly know, which, yes we want kids to have immediate recall, but let’s be real here, not all kids do. So how do we help our students, our children, who don’t instantly know the answer? 

Well, here is where subitizing plays a role. If kids don’t instantly know, they’ll go back and they’ll want to count 1 by 1 on their fingers. Instead, what I want to encourage you is to help them see the visualization through subitizing of those amounts. So let’s say we’re doing 8 + 7. 

If I had my own kid here, I would have them show 7 and I would show 8. So I’m going to show the 8. You hold up your fingers of 7. Show 7 with your fingers. And let’s see what we notice. If I have 8 and you have 7, what kids will often see, not all kids, because they need to do some subitizing work beforehand, is that we’ll see kids a lot of times say, “Oh, we each have a 5. 5 and 5 makes 10,” and then they’ll put the 3 and 2 together to make the other 5, and then the 10 and 5 makes 15. So seeing those groupings, that 8 is not just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Eight is a 5 and 3, helps them be able to chunk and put groups together. 

The same thing holds true as they move into multiplication. Kids often struggle with multiplying by 7s. Sevens are tough even for adults. But let’s say we have the problem 7 x 4. That really means 7 groups of 4. So if a kid doesn’t instantly know what 7 groups of 4 is, we will see them count by 4s. They’ll say, “4, 8, 12…”, which is a foundational piece, but really we want them to start seeing groups. 

So if you can hold up 7 fingers to represent 7 groups of 4 and get them to visualize.  They may need to model it, make 7 groups of 4. But using subitizing, we want to see, do they know what 5 groups of 4 is? Because 5 groups, they tend to know those ones quicker than any of the other multiplication facts. 2s, 10s, and 5s, kids will tend to know first. So if they know 5 groups of 4, like, hold it here, and ask “What’s 5 groups of 4?” “Oh, that’s 20.” And what’s 2 more groups of 4? “8.” So if we put those together, 28. 7 groups of 4 is 28. 7 times 4 is 28. So this ability to subitize helps them be able to see chunks and groups instead of seeing it 1 by 1 by 1.

Things you can do to build Subitizing for Kids

So how do we actually build that for our kids, whether it’s in a classroom or in our homes? My number-one advice is always to play games with kids. If you have dice, dice are great, because there’s a pattern there, and they’ll start to instantly recognize. That’s one of the ways that you can see if your kids have the ability to subitize is to play some dice games, if they roll the dice and they can tell how many instantly, or if they have to count the little marks on the dice. 

If you don’t have dice, cards are also great, but I don’t like normal decks of cards, because if you think about it, it’s not actually showing the correct amount. So if you have a deck of cards, and let’s say you have the 6 of hearts. When you look at the 6 of hearts, yes it has 6 hearts, but it also has one up in the corner and another one down in this corner. So there’s actually 8 hearts on a 6, which can be confusing for small kids. 

I would encourage you to find some subitizing cards, and you can find tons of them just by Googling subitizing cards. I will also link to ones that I’ve created. I call mine Savvy Subitizing, because they have all different kinds of patterns. We have finger patterns, we have tally marks, we have 10 frames, and rekenreks. If you’re not familiar with rekenreks, they’re beads on a string, and they’re red and white beads.  The red helps trigger that, after 5, they see the groups of red and white. It’s kind of like your fingers. The nice part about your fingers is they’re grouped all together. 

So if you don’t have cards and you don’t have dice, use fingers. We’ve all got those fingers, and just do finger patterns with kids. Ask them how many. Ask them to show you. Show me 4. If they’re always doing this, which is great, that’s a wonderful way to show 4, do something like, “What about this? Is this 4?” And at first, they’ll be like, “no,” depending upon the age level of your kids. When my kids did that, they were like, “That’s not 4. This is only 4.” So vary up your finger patterns. 

Another way to do it is just with snacks, or any kind of food. It doesn’t have to be snacks. But one of my favorites when my kids were little, was they loved Goldfish. And I would say something like, “You can have 2 Goldfish.” But I would give them 3 Goldfish. Or the reverse. Like, I’ll say, “You can have 4 Goldfish,” but I would only give them 3. And do they recognize when I’m not giving them the right amount? Those are just some quick tips to help you build subitizing for your kiddos. And I hope that this video has helped you build your math mind, so you can build the math minds of your students, right? Because our kiddos are now our students at home. All right. Have a great day.

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