What does a whiteboard with a sound box do? It improves reading skills in children. Also known as Elkonin Box, it is a literacy-building tool given to teachers in the Network for School Excellence. “My students are so happy when I get out the white boards,” said first grade teacher Rosalie Allred at McMonagle Elementary school in the Westwood Heights school district. According to Allred, her students’ reading skills have improved using the Elkonin Box. “My students definitely benefit from the hands-on materials we get through the Network,” she said, “the kids use them every day.”
How do the boxes work? Elkonin boxes help children learn to segment words into their individual sounds, a technique called phonemic awareness. The ability to identify and manipulate the sounds that make up words is a key skill for learning to read.
One of the earliest researchers to link phonemic awareness to reading was D.B. Elkonin (1963), a Russian psychologist. He developed a method of teaching children to segment the sounds in a word by moving markers into boxes on a piece of paper, hence the name “Elkonin boxes.”
The Elkonin Boxes distributed to participating schools support The Network for School Excellence goal to give teachers the tools they need to help Flint kids thrive.
The Network for School Excellence is one of six core initiatives of the Flint Center for Educational Excellence. The Network bridges the gap between schools serving Flint students, creating partnerships among K-12 teachers and administrators across four school districts, to ensure that all students in Flint thrive by enabling them to identify shared challenges and collaborate on solutions.
