Students in Miss Curley’s third-grade class used place value blocks to model and solve 9×30 by building groups of tens. First, they represented 30 as three tens. Then they created nine equal groups to match the 9 in the problem, laying out three tens in each group. As students combined and counted the blocks, they saw that 9 groups of 3 tens equals 27 tens. They recorded this as 27 tens = 270, making the connection from concrete manipulatives to the written equation. This hands-on strategy, aligned to benchmark NSO.2.3, helped students understand how multiplication relates to place value and repeated addition, and it supported productive math talk as they explained their thinking to classmates. Seeing the tens grouped and totaled built confidence and accuracy with multiplying by multiples of ten.
