Subitising Printable Dice Game

Number Dice Game is a printable game that is played much like Bingo. It is a fun activity for encouraging early maths skills using a set of dice to subitise, counting and number recognition numbers 1-6.

Subitising refers to immediately knowing how many items lie within a visual scene for a small number of items. It is to have a rapid and confident judgement to know at a glance and without counting to identify the number of items in a group. For example, when a dice is thrown the observer at a glance, immediately and accurately knows how many dots lie on the face of the dice without counting.

What you will need?

You will need 15 bottle top lids (or other tokens), dice and printable bingo number boards. We started our game with one dice and then added another to speed up the game and interest.

Click here to download and print: Printable Dice Bingo Boards

I have created 24 number bingo boards which can be used as a class set. You may wish to only print and laminate a few pages for small group station work, pairs or to use individually.

Let’s Play

To play the Dice Bingo Game, you throw one or two dice and cover the corresponding number on the number boards that is shown on the dice face. 1 dot: cover number 1, 2 dots: cover number 2 and so on.  This game can be played as a whole class, small groups, in pairs or individually.

Some Ideas:

• In the beginning, children will count the number of dots, this is okay and over time they will be able to recognise the dot patterns as an amount without counting (subitise).
• Aim for a couple of numbers first such as one and two, then three and four and so on.
• Talk about the patterns of dots such as number five has a dot in the middle. Number six has more than numbers one and two.

Let’s Learn

Why is Subitising Important?

• Subitising contributes to early forms of grouping. Seeing parts of a whole or that numbers are made up of other numbers.
• Understanding number relations: Interpreting number in terms of part-whole relationships makes it possible for children to think about a number as being made up of other numbers
• Understanding number relation: the notion that numbers are within numbers is important for separating, grouping and combining numbers as well as for multiplication, division and measurement

More Subitising Activities 

Take a look at our Printable Subitising Boards for more games

Take a look at our Subitising Play Dough Maths

Octavia and Vicky have a fabulous post on Magic Number Subitising Game

Click here for more NUMBER activities & play ideas