Judging "as much as" before formal instruction to measure

We carried out an explorative study, to analyse the behaviour of children at the beginning of the first grade when working with a particular kind of magnitude, so to say, intermediate between discrete and continuous: rice.. We interviewed 19 first grade children from an Italian school at the beginning of the school year. n we recognized in the children’s behaviours the similar remarkable insight to simplify the complexity of the comparison of two quantities by acting on them in order to focus only on one of their properties: in the discrete approach the chosen property is of course the numerosity; while in continuous approaches they chose to focus on the length, surface or volume.