Math Activity to Teach Subitizing: Fill the Tower

Math Activity: Fill the Tower

Strand: Number Sense and Numeration - Addition and Subtraction Continuum

Math Strategy: Subitizing

Fill the Tower:

Fill the Tower - Use square tiles or linking cubes, take turns building towers on a game board (MK5).  The towers are constructed by adding the number of tiles or cubes that have been rolled on the die. Play close attention to building the towers to the correct height.  The game ends when one player successfully fills all the towers on his or her gameboard.

How this Supports Learning:

These games promote components of counting and the strategy of subitizing.   There are three components of counting that children must learn in order to count accurately: one-to-one pointing (pointing at or touching each object that is being counted only once), the correct counting sequence (the sequence of number words you use to count 1,2,3,4,5,…), and coordinating (assigning a count to each object as you point at or touch it).  As children learn to count accurately, they may have difficulty with any one, or all of these components.  Counting accurately requires a great deal of time and many opportunities to count and to count for a purpose.

Overview of Games to support these strategies:  What to Look For, pages 158-161

Where to next?

Once students have developed confidence with counting and subitizing they should move towards using the counting on strategy,  which is when the student hold one of the numbers from an equation in their heads and continues to count on until they have counted as many as the second number.  Games and activities to promote the Counting On Strategy can be found in the book What to Look For on page 162.