Literacy: How to Build Object Boxes

I use object boxes A LOT.  I totally stole it from Montessori schools, so don't think I invented this at all.  However, building object boxes can be EXPENSIVE.  Lemme tell ya about how I did it on the cheap and then I'll tell you about what's in the boxes.

Finding cheap objects:

1.  Michaels Craft Stores:  The majority of my objects came from there.  You want four different things:

• the mini flat wood doodads for gluing on something else wood, usually a display of a hundred tiny drawers.(bus, sun, pig shown above)
• Crazerasers at $1 each 4-pack assortment (bag, bin, pin, and hat shown above)
• The kids necklace section (dog, cat, shown above)
• The 3-d wooden doodad section (egg, pot, bat shown above)

2.  Dollar store:  Only the rat above came from there, but I also got squirty sea creatures for the ray and whale and others, and the bug pack, and some snake and rats.

3.  Hobby Lobby:  Dollhouse miniatures that work out to less than $.50 per usable object. (see mop and lid above)  The tool pack, mops and brooms, pots and pans, food pack, dishes and silverware and a couple of others were the only ones on budget.  

4.  Junk drawers:  screws, bit (shown above), clips, etc were found in piles of nonsense around my home.

TYPES of object boxes:

• Kindergarten initial sound sorting boxes
• K-1st grade phonetic word building (cat, pig, bin)
• Four letter phonetic word building (belt, bell, etc.)
• 2nd grade multi-letter phonogram and spelling rule boxes (dish, shop, shin, etc.)

Materials needed:  objects, lots of plastic bags, sharpie, set of dollar store foam letter puzzles in lower case.

1. Sort objects by beginning sound.  

2.  Separate out those that are multi phonogram, harder to spell words and use them for your initial sound sorting.  Ex:  "Whale" has two things going on.  WH and the silent E.  This makes it really too advanced for teaching the wh or the silent e or using for spelling purposes.  But since initial sound boxes are NEVER spelled, a little kid can sort that into a W column for the beginning sound, so my whale went in the W bag.

3.  Toss in a foam letter for sorting purposes.

4.  Next sort out all objects that are three and four letter phonetic words (pig, cat, dog) and put those into a bag for elementary word building once all the letter sounds are learned.

5.  Next sort out all objects that have a single multi-letter phonogram or demonstrate a single spelling rule according to your phonics scheme.  Since this gets pretty complicated trying to find single phonogram words, I will sometimes use objects that have two phonograms but one was already learned a while back.  Ex:  "juice" demonstrates the ui phonogram AND the c,g,job 3 silent e rule.  Since I taught the silent e rule after the "ui" sound, it went in the silent e bag.  Below you can see that I had already taught oy, oi, and er before this lesson, so I didn't mind having those phonograms in my c,g, job 3 bag.

6.  Finally, fill in your bags with leftover doubles and random crap from around your house.  I try to get at least three object per Kindergarten initial letter sound and at least one per multi-letter phonogram (hopefully more).

7.  Put all the odd objects that aren't going to fit your scheme into church busy bags or something.  Crazerasers are a big hit around here.