All children are born with an innate ability to perceive the difference between 1 and 2 objects. With support and experience, they can quickly perceive and name “how many” for collections of 3, 4, and 5 objects. This mathematical ability is called subitizing. From the Latin word meaning suddenly, the term subitize refers to the ability to "see" a small amount of objects and know “how many” there are instantly without counting.
Not all arrangements of the same number are equally easy to subitize — preschoolers will recognize that there are 5 dots quickly if they are arranged like the corners of a square with a dot in the middle, but may be slower or less sure if the 5 dots are in a straight line, particularly if they are very close together. Understanding that subitizing is innate is a good start, but experience matters, too. Children need many experiences of noticing and naming small quantities in a variety of arrangements to strengthen their number sense.
While it’s important that adults get to hear children count out loud, it’s also important that they acknowledge when children correctly identify a small amount without counting it at all.
The above are excerpts from the Collaborative's book Big Ideas of Early Mathematics: What Teachers of Young Children Need to Know (2014).
Browse our collection of resources tagged SUBITIZING.
November 17, 2021
Quantity is a particular amount of something, expressed as a number. Quantity cards for young children can have pictures of small sets such as dots, finger patterns, or 5- or 10- frames. The ones we have available on our site use a variety of pictures or "suits," since matching quantities such as fingers and dots can help develop ideas about equivalence.
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After years of studying 3- and 4-year old children of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, Barbara Sarnecka has zeroed in on the importance of cardinality.
Here you can download cards and simple-to-learn game ideas to help young children build their understanding of early math concepts such as cardinality, composing and comparing numbers, and allowing them to subitize.
Regardless of how high a preschooler can rote count, a child’s sense of what those numbers actually mean develops gradually. We call this understanding number sense, and it requires relating numbers to real quantities.