Elkonin boxes are an instructional method used in the early elementary grades to build phonological awareness

Phonological awareness

Phonological awareness refers to an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of spoken words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and has, therefore, been the focus of much research.- Overview :Phonological...

 by segmenting words into syllable

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...

s or sounds. They are named after D.B. Elkonin, the Russian psychologist who pioneered their use. The "boxes" are squares drawn on a piece of paper or a chalkboard, with one box for each syllable or phoneme

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

, depending on what kind of segmentation is being done. To use Elkonin boxes, a child listens to a word

Word

In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...

 and moves a token into a box for each syllable or phoneme. In some cases different colored tokens may be used for consonants and vowels or just for each phoneme in the word.