Elkonin boxes are used to strengthen students’ phonological awareness. This strategy is used to assist with both segmenting and blending. Students can break apart words into their phonemes (i.e., individual sounds). Students can use this approach with 3 letter words that have short vowels (i.e., CVC), and with words that have blends and digraphs (i.e., CCVC, CVCC). Students may also implement this strategy when decoding words that contain vowel teams (i.e., ee, ea, oa, ie, etc.) or with multisyllabic words.

Elkonin boxes are also called Sound boxes because they help students recognize and identify individual sounds in words. This strategy not only creates an organized visual to model segmenting and blending strategies, but also helps students focus their attention on one sound at a time.

Students can use Elkonin boxes while studying spelling words, or while decoding unfamiliar words within sentences and paragraphs. While learning how to spell words, students can use this strategy to practice sounding out words slowly and carefully. This skill can also be used with listening comprehension to assess one’s ability to process and distinguish between sounds. For example, at home, parents can orally express a word and have their child slide a counter or tangible item into each box as they hear a sound. This will help people see whether or not a child can hear the sounds in spoken words. In addition, parents can ask specific questions such as, “What is the last sound you hear in the word ‘sip’? Here, the parent would segment the word slowly and the child would determine what the final consonant is.

Teacher: Shows the word “stop” in isolation.

Teacher: “What’s the word?”

Student uses 3 boxes and letter tiles:

St o p

Here, the student notices that the word stop contains a beginning blend (st). For this, the student places a letter tile of the beginning blend in one box to assist with fluency. Next, the student remembers that the letter “o” says /o/ like octopus. The student then places an “o” in the second box. Lastly, the student remembers that “p” says /p/ like pan. After breaking apart the unknown word into its individual phonemes, the student sounds out the word.

Teacher: Great job using the Elkonin boxes to segment the unknown word! Segment means to break apart. Now, blend the sounds together to form the word.”

Student: /st/ /o/ /p/ spells, “stop”.

Teacher: “I love the way you used a decoding strategy to help you read that word!”