A pair of four-year-olds in my classroom are happily playing “dice wars,” a simple but fast-paced game. To play, each child rolls a die and the player who rolls the highest number wins. No one is keeping score today—and nobody seems to care who wins each round. 

I watch as Juan shakes the die between his palms, rolls it, counts each pip (dot) on the side that’s facing up and announces, “1, 2, 3!” I rolled a three!”

“My turn!” exclaims Maria as she shakes the die between her hands and rolls it. “SIX! I win! Six is more than three!” Maria doesn’t need to count the pips. She recognizes the pattern immediately and her number sense tells her the value of the pips on the die.

Rolling a die is fun in its own right, but these friends are working on the math skill known as subitizing. When children begin to recognize the pattern on the die and associate it with the number of pips (dots) without counting each pip, that is subitizing!

Children develop subitizing skills in much the same way that they learn to read sight words.

In a previous Early Math Counts blog post, Jen Asimow, M.Ed, explained it this way: “Remember when you learned about ‘sight words’ and how children learn them? According to one school of thought, children memorize sight words by taking a mental snapshot of the entire word. By using context clues, they learn the word as a ‘whole’ rather than as a series of letters. Consider how children learn the words EXIT or STOP.  Both of these words appear in the same way—on signs above doors or on red octagonal street signs—and nearly always in the same colors and typefaces. All of these clues help children form a mental picture of these two words, and they often learn the pictures before they learn the individual letters that make up the words.”

Maria and Juan are playing with a die, so they are only working with numbers ranging from one to six. As they play successive rounds of the game, they are beginning to recognize the patterns on the die without counting the individual pips.

With every roll of the die, Juan’s pattern-recognition skills are growing stronger. Before long, he can recognize the total number of pips on each throw without counting.

According to child development experts, the ability to subitize quantities up to and including four by the age of five represents a significant developmental milestone. 

Subitizing is a fundamental math skill, and dice games are a good way to help foster the development of this skill.

“Hey! Do you want to play that block-building dice game?” asks Pierre as he grabs a die from the jar and joins the group. 

Roll and Build is another dice game that we’ve played in our classroom for years. One child rolls a die and the other children add that number of blocks to their towers. Children learn to recognize four dots on a die, which helps them understand the cardinal value (how many four represents), which they can then link to the symbol (4) and the word (four).

Games like this provide repeated opportunities to interpret the dot images. As children figure out how many pieces to collect or add or how many spaces to move on a game board, they develop their number sense and other early math skills such as counting, number identification, the correlation between numbers and the items being counted and concepts such as greater than or less than.

Keep a jar full of dice within easy reach to give the children plenty of opportunities to practice and make up their own games.

Begin by subitizing quantities of 1, 2 and 3. In a math workshop that I attended, the trainer had blacked out the pips representing 4, 5 and 6 for the younger children.

If a child is having difficulty subitizing, reduce the quantity of dots. 

Dice games help young children develop math and social-emotional skills in a fun and engaging way.  So grab some dice and introduce your gang to subitizing fun! 

Check out our Early Math Counts lessons page for dice game ideas. Be sure to click on the Connect With Families button in the left-hand column of each lesson to download a Parent Letter that you can customize to share the day’s learning activity with parents and other family members.

So far, we have introduced two games: dot bingo and the dot card matching game. Our final game for this month is called “Fill That Parking Lot.” This game enables our youngsters to think of numbers one through nine in terms of their relationship to the number ten and to build a strong foundation for addition and subtraction.

For this game you will need:

• The dot cards that you created for the dot card matching game (only use cards with the numbers one through three)
• Small toy cars or you can use the template for car counters
• A printer to download and print the Parking Game and Car Counter templates

Printable Parking Game and Counter Templates

• Once you have downloaded the template, print as many copies as you need, one for each player.

The object of the game is to fill your parking lot (hence the name)! Each player will take a turn flipping over a dot card, determine how many cars they need to park in their parking lot based on the number of dots on the card, and then use your counters or cars to fill the parking lot, whoever fills the parking lot first, wins! For example, if you have the number three, take three cars or counters and fill up there spots in the parking lot. Continue taking turns and filling up the parking lots until you have a winner!

It is important to have your children fill up the parking lot in a meaningful way for this activity to be effective. Have them fill up one row at a time or have them choose spots that are touching one another or next to one another. This will help your children see the relationships between numbers one through ten.

Some questions you can ask your child while playing are:

• How many more cars do you need to fill your parking lot?
• I have six cars in my parking lot, how many more cars do I need to get to 10?
• What is happening to our parking lots, do we have more cars or less cars?

I would love to hear your comments on these games! Looking forward to hearing from you.

Happy subtizing!

The first step should be focusing on the meanings of the numbers rather than the symbols. A great way to do this is dot cards.

For this activity you will need a set of plain index cards and dot stickers. I used traditional 3×5 blank index cards, but any size will work as long as they are consistent. For the dot stickers, “color coding labels” work great for this activity!

When first introducing this activity, I like to use small numbers, for example one through five. For the number one, you take one index card and one dot sticker. Place the dot sticker as close to the very center of the index card as possible.

For the number two, take two dot stickers and place them in the center right next to one another. The placement and arrangement of the dots on the card will make it easier for our children, especially when this activity is first introduced, to begin their number understanding. 

Continue this process until you get to the number five, following the visual aid as closely as possible. When I first introduce this game, I like to use the same color stickers throughout the first sets of cards. Once you have completed your first set of cards, make a second set following the same steps. It is important that these two sets of cards are as identical as possible.

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So, now that you’ve created your two sets of dot cards, what are you going to do with them? First, look at the cards with your child and see if they can identify what these dots represent. Go through each card one at a time and have a conversation about what they see. Some questions you can ask are:

• “Can you tell me what you see?”
• “I see one dot on this card, how many do you see on this one (show them a different card)?”
• “I see two dots on this card, can you show me the number two with your fingers?”

There are different ways to incorporate these cards into playtime with your children. Some of my favorites are:

• Dot Card War: For this game I like to add a blank index card in the pile to introduce children to the number zero. I then shuffle all of the cards from both sets (making sure each set has a blank card). Then deal a card to each player. The player with the bigger number (more dots) gets to keep all of the cards for that round. Keep repeating this process until you run out of cards.
• Dot Card Match: Shuffle the cards from both sets together, and lay them face down. Like in traditional matching games, each player gets a chance two pick two cards and turn them over. The goal to find the cards that has the same number of dots on them. Once the player, finds the matching cards, they get to keep them. Each player takes a turn until you run out of the cards. If you would like to make this game last longer, you can make additional sets of dot cards. If you would like to make it more challenging, you can change the dot arrangements in additional sets of dot cards.

Have fun subtizing!

How to Develop Subitizing

The ability to subitize can be developed by using pattern recognition skills. By working with a small set of numbers, children can start to develop an understanding of what numbers mean and what they represent. For example, five strawberries could be a set of two strawberries and a set of three strawberries, or a set of four strawberries and one strawberry. This means that a child looking at five strawberries doesn’t only see five strawberries, but also see two and three, or maybe one and four, and five and zero strawberries. Once children are familiar and comfortable with various representations of numbers 1 to 5, larger sets can be introduced (1 to 10).

How can we use subitizing to support our children’s developing understanding of numbers?

• Start with a small set of numbers.

• Subitizing relies on visual patterns. Not all arrangements of a number are equally easy to “see.”

Activities to Build Subitizing Skills

This month, we will open the doors to the world of subitizing by introducing simple and fun DIY games that you can play with your 3 to 5 year-olds.

Stay tuned!

While observing a kindergarten classroom the other day, I observed a child counting the pips on a die each time she rolled it.  The lesson asked that children roll one die, read the number of pips, and complete a word chart determined by the number.  Interestingly, this child could both read simple sight words and write them, but could not read the number 3 on a die.

This got me thinking about the activity itself.  It was clearly set up as a literacy lesson, asking that children practice their reading and writing, but the addition of the die asks that children also practice their subitizing skills.  Remember, subitizing is the ability to look at a group of objects, in this case the pips on the die, and know “how many” there are without counting them.  This ability to take a mental snapshot works much like reading sight words does but we work on sight word reading all of the time with children and focus on skills like subitizing much less often.  Even while observing this activity, the teacher worked diligently with the child on sounding out the words, reading them, and writing them down.  However, when the child tossed the die, she was left to figure out the number without the same sort of support.  Why is that?

If I had been supporting this activity, I would have focused on the die as much as on the words.  The math is as important as the reading and writing and deserves equal time.

There are several ways to support children as they begin to subitize.  One thing you can try is to have the child toss the die and then before she counts the pips, pick up the die and see if she can tell you “how many” were on it.  If she can’t, show her the side again and ask her “how many.”  Let her count and tell you how many there are.  The next time, try it again until she becomes more familiar with the patterns of the pips.  With ongoing support a child of 4 and 5 should easily be able to subitize up to 6.