What Are Elkonin Boxes? (with printable resource to try at home)

Elkonin boxes (or sound boxes) serve as an effective and valuable tool for enhancing phonemic awareness skills among young learners. This multi-sensory strategy is used to engage students in activities focused on identifying, segmenting, blending, and manipulating individual sounds (phonemes) within words. Through guided exercises, students listen attentively as teachers pronounce words aloud, then carefully place tokens or manipulatives in corresponding boxes to represent each sound they hear. For example, for the word “chip”, students would push 3 magnets into the boxes for /ch/ /i/ /p/. Elkonin boxes can also be used to help with syllable awareness and spelling. This hands-on research-based approach fosters a deeper understanding of the relationship between sounds and letters, laying a solid foundation for literacy development. 

Check out this video to learn how to use this strategy and download the tool to use with your reader(s)!

Fun Fact: Elkonin Boxes were developed in 1963 by D.B. Elkonin who was a Russian psychologist. He studied 5-6 year old's and found that teaching them to segment words into individual speech sounds was a useful strategy to improve student reading.