Elkonin boxes: how to use sound boxes step by step

What are Elkonin boxes?

Elkonin boxes are named after D. B. Elkonin, a Soviet psychologist who used them in the 1960s. Most teachers today just call them sound boxes. You draw a row of connected squares, one for each sound in the word you will say.

The key is one box per sound, not per letter. Duck has four letters and three sounds, so it gets three boxes. That one rule is what makes the tool useful, because it forces the student to listen to the word instead of counting letters they think they remember.

What do you need?

• A card or whiteboard with two, three, four and five box rows.
• Tokens: counters, coins or small blocks, one color to start.
• Letter tiles or a dry-erase marker for the later stages.
• A list of words chosen for the stage you are teaching.

Laminate the cards or draw on whiteboards. Students will use them hundreds of times over a year, and fancy versions with themed pictures and colors do not work any better than plain squares drawn with a marker.

How do you use sound boxes step by step?

1. Say the word. The student repeats it.
2. The student says the word slowly, stretching it.
3. As they say each sound, they push one token into a box, left to right.
4. They touch each token and say its sound again.
5. They run a finger under the boxes and say the whole word.

When do you switch from tokens to letters?

As soon as the student knows the letters for the sounds in the word, which might be after a week for some students and a month for others. You can mix the two: letters in the boxes where the student knows them, plain tokens for the rest.

With letters, the student writes one grapheme per box. For fish, f goes in the first box, i in the second, and sh, both letters, in the third. That is the moment the digraph makes sense to a student. Two letters, one box, one sound.

Which words work best?

Start with words that have two or three sounds and stretchy first sounds, like am, sun and fan, then move to stop sounds, then four-sound words with a final blend, like nest, then initial blends, like crab.

Pick words whose sounds the student can hear clearly in your accent and theirs. Words with r after a vowel, like car or bird, are tricky to box. Leave those until the r-controlled vowels are taught.

What mistakes do students make?

• Pushing tokens too fast, ahead of their voice. Have them say the sound first, then push.
• Filling boxes right to left. Mark the starting box with a green dot.
• Leaving the middle box empty. Stretch the word together and stop on the vowel.
• Guessing the number of boxes from how long the word looks. Say the word before giving the card.

Do sound boxes help older students too?

Yes, with a different look, since older students do better with boxes drawn on a whiteboard than with colored counters. Use them for spelling words with tricky vowel sounds or for checking a misspelling. For longer words, draw boxes for each syllable rather than each sound.

Sound boxes are a means to an end. Once a student can segment and spell a pattern without them, put them away for that pattern. Bring them back when a new spelling comes up.

How do sound boxes help with spelling choices?

Once students know more than one way to spell a sound, the boxes help them think about which spelling fits. The sound count stays the same, but the student now has to decide what goes in each box. That decision is where spelling patterns come alive.

Take the long a sound. In rain, it gets ai in the middle box. In play, it gets ay at the end. In cake, the student writes a in the middle box and adds the e outside the last box, since the e has no sound of its own. Drawing that e outside the box is a simple, visual way to explain silent e.

Use the same trick with ck, tch and dge later on. The student sees that some sounds take two or three letters and that the box still holds one sound, which is exactly the idea you want them to keep.