One of these things is not like the others...or is it?

After working with the kits I think I figured out some commonalities. First, a lot of the activities were based upon misconceptions. For example, when guessing the order of objects based on size, many of them looked as if they were obviously larger than another object yet when they were compared using a common measuring device, it turned out that they were either the same size or opposite of what was previously believed. So, I would say one thing that all the activities have in common is that they all deal with the notion that things (size, volume, etc) aren't always what they seem.

Another thing that I noticed was that the activities dealt with comparisons that were based on commonalities. Once one amount or length was known, that could be used to determine the size or amount of another item. I think it's kind of like fractions...you find the common denominator in order to compare the two items. In the case of one of the activities, beans were used to determine the amount that an object could hold. Instead of just blindly guessing how much another object could hold, the amount of beans in one object could help determine the amount of beans the other object could hold. The beans were the common denominator used to compare sizes of different objects.