Finger Counting: Helpful or a Crutch?
Hello everyone! It is the start of the spring season for your child. How do you know your child is mastering their addition and subtraction concepts in school? Sometimes it can be hard to tell. I have been a tutor for years to children of all math abilities. Seeing their progress is truly amazing. When I look for mastery of concepts, I look for strategy use. I also look for math connections, applications to advanced concepts, and their increased confidence in math. One sign that children have not mastered their math facts is finger counting.
As a tutor, one thing I try to move away from is finger counting. It is a great love used by very young children all over the world. Rightfully, they should love it! Finger counting is a great tool for preschoolers and early kindergarteners just learning about numbers. However, one thing I see all too often is children using finger counting as a crutch. This habit becomes a chore for them to solve problems. Finger counting also takes their focus away from the math connections that help students apply their knowledge to more advanced concepts. Math is all about patterns, number movement, problem solving, and mathematical connections. Those elements really need to be started early in their educational journey.
I have done some research on this subject and read other insights into this. Some say to try and stop finger counting after first grade. I believe even earlier is better. I have taught first grade previously, and I can tell you that first grade is packed with an enormous number of strategies and math connections. Your child could possibly miss out on those amazing math building opportunities because they are stuck just using their fingers to count. When some children get stuck using finger counting, they tend to just stick with that and not apply other strategies that are more important to their math connection building.
If your child is already stuck in finger counting, it is okay! You can still help them move away from it. Encourage other ways of solving problems such as adding onto 9 by making that 9 a 10. This strategy helps students understand the close distance between 9 and 10. It also looks at how the movement of numbers can create two different problems with the same sum. A connection was just made during that process!
You can also help your child see the patterns and connections in different addition and subtraction problems. One helpful concept is math fact families. Helping children understand that addition and subtraction have an inverse relationship, can greatly help with addition and subtraction fluency.
There are so many amazing strategies aside from finger counting that I could discuss, but then this post would be 100 pages long! I hope to be offering a seminar soon through my website on how to successfully move your child away from finger counting. If you would like to be notified when sign up opens, please join my mailing list. Thank you for reading this post, and I hope you are having a great week!
- Stephanie