Sunday, April 14, 2019

How to Use CVC Sound Boxes

If you're in the business of teaching kids how to read, you'll want to know about using free CVC sound boxes for blending and phonological awareness.  Sound boxes are a tool used to help emergent readers segment words into isolated sounds. Using CVC sound boxes, also known as Elkonin boxes, provides beginning readers a visual space to isolate letter sounds before learning to blend and form words.  Integrating phonics activities for kids is a vital process when learning how to read. 


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Let's break this down. A phoneme is a sound. Phoneme segmentation is the ability to break words into individual sounds.  For example, cat would be /c/ /a/ /t/.  This skill will lead to strong reading development and fluency. 



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Students in kindergarten and first grade focus heavily on phoneme segmentation, using CVC sound boxes for blending and phonological awareness.  Research shows kids who struggle with phonological awareness will not be strong readers.  


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When using CVC sound boxes, kids have a visual representation to see how many sounds are in the word. Using tactile objects and kinesthetic movements, such as manipulatives and tapping one sound for each box, are excellent reading intervention strategies for kids learning to read.  

These FREE CVC sound box worksheets truly become an interactive reading experience for emergent readers. 




Items to use with CVC Sound Boxes:


  • Bear Counters
  • Skittles
  • m&m's
  • Unifix cubes
  • Buttons
  • Chip counters
  • Cereal (fruit loops, cheerios, etc)
  • Mini erasers
  • Playdoh


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In this video of kids using the free CVC sound boxes to learn how to read, you will see sound boxes with pictures located to the left.  The cvc pictures are the same cvc word family pictures that I focus on when introducing a new word family, such as the -et words.  




You can get these free sound boxes, along with word family cards with pictures, cvc worksheets, decodable books, and more in my FREE 24pg. CVC resource packet.  To get your free download, today, simply sign up for my newsletter below.  


With each newsletter, you will get a paid resource from my TPT store, free!  If you'd like to see the resources includes with your free cvc packet, you can visit my post about CVC Word Families, HERE


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