Sound Boxes: Breaking up a word by its phonemes

Hello! Just a quick post from me today. I've had this one sitting here for a while unpublished. Not sure why.. Maybe I wanted to add something spectacular to it. Well, let's just get this baby published. It truly is a little "snippet". I mean, really, how often do I give you a true "snippet." I'm too long-winded for that! Ha! So here we are. An actual snippet. :)

Do you use sound boxes (otherwise known as Elkonin boxes)? I'm a big fan. I use them with my kinders to improve their phonemic awareness and I use them with my first and second graders to help them with their spelling of phonetic words. I blogged about  it here.  If you want to leaner more about what they are and how to use them, check out this post. :) You can get a little freebie there, too!

I love these stamps! You can get them here. They make it easy to use sound boxes during small group instruction.  There are two, three, and four squares as options!

If your kids need help breaking up the word, sometimes having those little circles there to "push" into the boxes helps.  

I use this with my beginning readers and writers and with my first grade students who are struggling with spelling. If you have a student who is having a hard time with the spelling part of writing, this may help. Pull a small group and practice sounding out words with this activity. You may also identify sounds that students are consistently having trouble with. I also like to do this when we introduce digraphs. It is great for all kinders who are just learning to stretch out sounds. When I taught first grade, I used these with the whole class for at least the first few months and longer as needed. :) Then I continued to work with them in small groups. Later, I brought them back when it was time for vowel pairs. 

If you want ideas about how to do this with the whole class, read my old post.