Do you Elkonin?

Elkonin boxes are used to teach phonemic awareness by having the child listen for individual sounds and moving a chip or unifix cube in the box where they hear the sound.  Each box in represents one phoneme or sound.  We all know that segmenting words can be a difficult skill our children to acquire, but it is one that our children need for future success in reading. 
I used to use this an elkonin box like this one:


My children need something more engaging during guided reading groups.  So I can up with this one!



Most of the children that I teach need explicit instruction in phonemic awareness. So, at the beginning of the year I give each child 3 chips that they house in the boxes.  I say a word such as fish. They repeat by stretching the word and sliding a chip to each circle in the submarine.
For example, fish    /f/  /i/  /sh/  Then they place their pointer finger on the dot and blend the sounds together. 
I hope you found this helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions. If you like this idea, I have the submarine elkonin box for you to down. Just click on the picture above!