Would you like to know the BIGGEST mistake I ever made in teaching ‘Number Sense’ to my 3-7 year olds?

(And to be fair, I couldn’t have NOT made is because I hadn’t been given the right tools to teach any differently. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.)

I had always believed that it was counting that would enable my children to make sense of how numbers are made up of ‘parts’, how place value (including ‘teen numbers’ of course) work and then calculate (add, subtract, multiply, divide, work with fractions and more). 

Every course, every book, every scheme had taught me this. For over 20 YEARS!

So that’s what I focused upon.

I taught my children to ‘count all’, then ‘count on’. (Whilst at the same time teaching them automatic recall of number bonds without context and by rote, day in and day out).

The result?

I created children whose only strategy for adding and subtracting was to count in 1s on their fingers or ‘head bob’ along an imaginary number line. They took this appr...

So what is subitising and how does it differ to counting? 

These was a question I asked myself, for a long time.

Subitising is our ability to know ’how many?’ without counting.

It turns out that this is a skill we’re all born with. From a very young age we recognise certain patterns of ‘number’ such as the ‘3’ made up my the human face (but of course we don’t think of it as ‘three’ because that’s a word we haven’t learned yet). We also know when there are more and less of something (such a pieces of fruit for us to eat). This skill of recognise a number pattern (in the case of our main carer’s face) and a larger quantity of food are driven by our primal instinct to keep us alive.

‘Counting’ (for cardinality - to find out ‘how many?’) by contrast is a human creation.

The symbols and names we used were invented and evolved over tens of thousands of years. Our ancestors operated in a world without number names or a counting system and definitely still used ‘number sense’ every d...