ELKONIN BOXES
"A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid." J.R.R. Tolkien
WHAT IT IS
Elkonin boxes are used to divide words into phonemes, syllables, or word parts
They are a visual tool to support students in identifying, blending or segmenting phonemes.
Teachers can use letters, sound chips or other items to visually display, segment, and blend sounds.
WHY IT MATTERS
Elkonin boxes are a convenient way to help students begin to connect sound letter connection and grasp orthographic mapping. Later they can be used for more advanced segmentation (syllables, word parts).
They offer a visual scaffold for students, and they can be fun!
Additionally, orthographic mapping with Elkonin boxes can help teachers to clarify, deepen, and solidify their own understanding of phoneme usage and orthographic mapping.
Orthographic mapping is a strong indicator of reading fluency.
Developing automaticity with these foundational skills is paramount to furthering and deepening literacy skills
They help students recognition and usage of spelling patters become for automatic.
When students are able to understand and recognize these patterns, this opens opportunities for curiosity, questions, and wonderings about word patterns.
Elkonin boxes allow use to do this in a scaffolded, efficient, effective, manner.
They can be implemented into review, new concepts, new vocab when teaching content.
Investing the time to get comfortable with them and get your students used to the routine of using them will pay off extremely well.
HOW TO IMPLEMENT
Start using them. That is the best way to get comfortable with them and to effectively solidifying them into your practice.
Draw boxes on the board, print out boxes for students to use, laminate them so they can be reused, slide them into a clear cover page, adapt math squares, purchase physical or digital ones.
Are you including the image of a word that you are working on (i.e. a picture of a tree and 3 boxes)?
Are you giving students more than enough boxes for each phoneme (i.e. 6 boxes for the word ‘sit’)?
Are you having them add boxes for each phoneme as they write them?
Are you giving students the exact number of boxes for a work (i.e. 2 boxes for ‘bee’)?
They are boxes, don’t overthink it, but do think.
Start by using sound chips to represent sounds when practicing phonemic awareness.
Begin to use letters when students seem ready (the sooner the better).
You will soon find that you will have to codify your usage with some words. There are not necessarily right or wrong answers for some of these questions, but you do want to think about them before hand and be consistent in usage. You can also talk out your thinking with students for some meta-awareness.
Do you put blends in the same box?, where do silent letters go?, or ‘magic e’ ?, double letters?, ‘ng’ blend sounds? how do you display ‘X’=/ks/?
I’ll argue the exact manner you solve these issues is not as important as being consistent.
Use them to introduce new words or sounds, use them to review, use them to be part of a daily routine. Start or end each class with students segmenting a word into a box, it takes one minute and builds automaticity and consistency.
Allow students to use them as a support to do a spelling check while writing
Laminate them or put them in plastic sleeves
Laminate and tape a copy into students notebooks, or teach them how to quickly make one on their own.
Start getting comfortable with Elkonin boxes and get students using them, and start thinking “inside the box”!