In school we use what you will hear your children calling ‘Pink Boards’. These are magnetic boards that have letters and phonemes for the children to practise. The children use these boards daily in different ways.
- They push and pull letters apart to discover the different sounds and phonemes.
- They write the words to help with their writing.
- They do ‘dots and dashes’ (diacritical marking) to recognise if is a single sound, a phoneme or a ‘split phoneme’.
- They cover up words and try to spell them unseen.
Elkonin Boxes – sound complicated but very simple! You place each individual letter or phoneme in it’s own box. Then you say each sound before saying the whole word and doing ‘dots and dashes’ (diacritical marking) from above. This helps the children to visualise each sound all by itself. This can be done with magnetic letters also.
