Using Elkonin Sound Boxes for Decoding & Spelling

Looking for a simple yet powerful tool to boost your students' phonemic awareness and phonics skills?

This video introduces Elkonin boxes, also known as sound boxes. These visual tools, simple boxes on paper, are used to help children segment and map individual speech sounds (phonemes) in a word.

Each box represents one sound, allowing students to physically place tokens or letters into boxes for every sound they hear.

We'll guide you through two general ways to use sound boxes: starting with tokens for beginners (using chips, Cheerios, or coins), then quickly progressing to the preferred method of using letters (grapheme tiles, magnetic letters, or writing graphemes) once students know letter-sound correspondences. Research strongly supports the effectiveness of incorporating letters into phonemic awareness instruction.

A crucial takeaway: every box contains one grapheme, not just one letter. You'll see examples like "match" where "TCH" (three letters) goes into a single box because it represents one sound, "ch". We'll demonstrate with words like "ship," "church," "coin," and "jump" to illustrate how sounds map to graphemes in the boxes.

This simple, multimodal activity transforms abstract auditory language into a concrete, tactile experience, effectively bridging phonemic awareness and phonics instruction.

Ready to see an immediate impact on your students' decoding and encoding? Learn how to use sound boxes effectively – watch the video!

⭐️ Sound Mapping Worksheets & Resources: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/P...