I'm not kjeetgill, but I also group things visually in 5 when counting. On your question, I feel less confident in my count, the more things I have to count. S

I'm not kjeetgill, but I also group things visually in 5 when counting. On your question, I feel less confident in my count, the more things I have to count. Since there will always be fewer groups of 5 than groups of 1, I always feel more confident counting in groups of 5 than of 1. EDIT: It's like divide and conquer. You divide the work by first making sure each group has only 5 items by glance counting (what kjeetgill means with 2 + 3), and then you count the groups, and add what didn't fit in any group. Having the work divided like this makes it easier to verify that it was all done correctly. You'll end up feeling more confident about some groupings than others (because of the way the items are positioned) and you'll just want to recheck the ones you're not so confident about and readjust accordingly. Once you're confident in the groupings, you can recount the groups more easily than having to recount each individual thing. For most sums, you'll end up adding less than 5 or 10 things at each step, which is easy.