There are now BIG Cheez-Its (U.S. only, it appears). The package claims that they are “Twice the size!” of regular Cheez-Its.
On seeing this claim, I thought for sure that we were gonna have a We mean four times, but say twice sort of a situation on our hands. So I bought some.
And then I asked Tabitha (6 years old) and Griffin (8 years old) what they thought. I started with Tabitha when Griffin wasn’t around so I could get her pure thoughts.
She put one cracker on top of the other and proclaimed, “No”.
I wanted to know the source of that. I thought she might be making the classic linear v. area error (i.e. interpreting twice to mean twice the side length). So I asked.
She pointed to the uncovered part of the BIG Cheez-It and argued that this didn’t constitute another full regular Cheez-It. Score one point for argumentation, but minus one for spatial visualization.
A few minutes later, it was Griffin’s turn. He ran like a chipmunk with his two crackers into the dining room. Experiment over, right?
Nope.
He was in search of paper and a pen. He carefully traced each cracker, cut out the uncovered part of the BIG one and attempted to partition and reassemble this remainder on top of a tracing of the regular cracker, which it did not completely cover.
Sadly the cut outs are lost forever.
His conclusion: BIG Cheez-Its are almost but not quite twice the size of the regular Cheez-Its.
Volume perhaps?
Addendum 1
If the crackers are twice as big, but the mass of one serving is constant, and if one serving of regular Cheez-Its consists of 27 crackers, how many crackers should be in one serving of BIG Cheez-Its?
There are 14.
Addendum 2
If the area of a BIG Cheez-It is about twice the area of a regular Cheez-It (as Griffin confirmed), then the side lengths should be in a ratio of approx. 7:5 (a reasonable estimate of the square root of 2).
addendum 3
Notice the progression in the children’s strategies. The six-year old worked with the crackers. The eight-year old worked with representations of the crackers. Similar conclusions were reached; the child who worked with representations could manipulate those representations in order to achieve a greater degree of accuracy, and to investigate hypotheses that the child working concretely could not.
Neither child used tools to calculate areas.
Overthinking my teaching 