Dot Cards and Subitizing!

One of the outcomes in our Grade One Math curriculum involves students being able to recognize familiar arrangements of 1 to 10 (as on dice, ten frames) at a glance without counting.  (This is called subitizing in teacher talk!)

Here are some pictures to show some of the activities we've been working on to practice this concept:

Students were quickly shown this arrangement of counters on the Smartboard.  They were given 2 or 3 seconds to take a quick mental picture while thinking about the different groups they saw.  For example, some students saw the group of six in the middle with two on the top and two on the bottom.  Others saw a group of eight with two on the side!

Then, students had to "build" the same arrangement of counters on their desk using their linking cubes and tell how many cubes they had.

After lots of practice with this activity, students then used small dot cards to practice identifying "how many at a glance" with a partner.

This afternoon in Science, we practiced sorting animals according to how they move.  Students worked in small groups of three or four to decide if their animal walked, ran, crawled, swam, hopped or flew.