Subitising

Welcome back young mathematicians. We're gonna play around with some ideas more, less or same. I'm going to show you two different collections and I'd like you to think about, which one is more or which one has less or are they the same?

So let's have a go. Here come your first two collections. Which one has more? That's right, it is this one, isn't it? and I think you can tell that it has more without even counting. You can use your skills in visual recognition and subitising because look, this one has dots in every box and this one has a dot in one box. So this one has to be more, which means this one has to be less.

Ok, let's try another one. Are you ready? What about this time? Here we go. Which one has more? This one. Which one has less? This one. Are they the same?

No. And I don't actually have to count this one either because I can see this would correspond to that block. This teddy would match this block and then I have all of these other ones leftover that don't have a matching pair. So I know this is more and this has less. Ok, let's try another one.

Are you ready? Ok, here we go. Oh. Yes, that's right. This one has more and this one has less. And again we don't have to count because we can see here that that's one, ten-frame and it's not full, but over here there's two, ten-frames and both of them are full. That's right, so this must have more, which means this one has less.

Ok, let's try another one. Are you ready? Here we go. What about now? Which one has more? This side. Which one has less? Yes, and are they the same? Not yet. We haven't found any that are the same yet.

Ok, let's try another one. Here we go. Ready? Which one has more? Haha, which one has less? You're right, this time it's the same. So I can line them up. These ones have a pair that match. These ones match and this one matches. So they both have the same amount and I could count to check as well. Look. One, two, three like a triangle and one, two, three like a dice. They both have the same because they both have three.

Ok, let's try another one. Here we go. Ready? Which one has more? Yes, this side isn't it and which one has less? This one. And are they the same? No you're right, they can't be because this is more and this is less. They can't be the same. And, actually what we're using here is we're subitising aren't we? To see which one has more and which one has less. We could be more precise. Would you like to do that? And we can count them to see how many? Ok, let's try that.

So, one, two, three like a triangle and on this side. Ok. One, two, three, four, five, six seven, eight, nine bears. This side has three bears, which is less than nine bears.

Ok, let's try one more little mathematicians. See what happens? Are you ready? Ok. Are they more, less or the same? Oh, you're having to count aren't you? Yeah, 'cause it's so close, it's hard to tell. Should we count them together and see? Ok, so over here I can see three and three, and I actually, I know three and three is six because I've learned that by looking at dice patterns. That when I have three on one side and three on the other side, that looks like a dice.

And on this side I can see three and two and one. Let's count. So, three, four, five, six. And on this side. Three, four, five, six or one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. So this side has six and this side has six. So they have to be the same. Nice work mathematicians. That one was tricky.

So what was the mathematics we were just playing with? Well, we used our skills of subitising this time to talk about and determine some really important relationships, like more, less and the same. And what you might have noticed is that when the collections got really big or, or one of the collections got really big, or when the collections were really close together or the same, it was sometimes really hard to workout more, less the same, just through subitising. So we had to use other skills to help us work that out.

Nice work today, little mathematicians.