Question

which strategy do you prefer to use to multiply with multiples of 10: base ten blocks, a number line, or place value? Explain why.

Answer 1

place value. when multiplying by 10 you are moving a decimal, having everything lined up like place value would save you a lot of time.

Answer 2

In the base ten block method we use boxes for multiplying.

For 1 we use 100-block box,

For 10 we use 1000-block box.

For example: 10 × 4,

For this we need to take 4, 1000-block boxes,

Thus, the have total single boxes = 4000

Which is equivalent to 40.

Thus, 10 × 4 = 40

By the number line method,

If we want to find 10 × 4 by the number line method.

Then we will start counting 4 10's from 0 and 4th 10's occurs at 40.

Thus, 10×4 = 40

By the place value method,

If we want to multiply a number by a number then we will split a number into its place value then multiply each place value by the given number,

For example, 52 × 10

(50+2) × 10

50 × 10 + 2 × 10 = 500 + 20 = 520

Since, all method are easy, but when we talk about large number then Place value method is appropriate to use, because we can not count total 10's from 0 for a large number like 520. Also, for large number applying base ten block method is not appropriate.