THRASS TWO-DAY CERTIFICATE,
DAY 2, WANDSWORTH, FEB 26, 2007

Very enjoyable and informative. A great mixture of teaching styles, use of technology and variety of presentation. You work us hard, but we learn and enjoy. I really like the English Calendar Chart.

Worked well re-visiting what was covered on first day, plus lots more and more ideas for top of KS2.

Really useful to go over the articulation and the phoneme raps. Lots of useful teaching tips – games to play and also helpful to see the Phoneme Machine in action.

Very good course. Very informative. Very clear. After Day 2 I really feel like I have moved on and feel more confident in teaching THRASS in the classroom.

New Phoneme Machine – excellent. Really pleased that all staff are so enthusiastic, especially KS2. Clapping syllables – focussing on unstressed vowels really useful. An excellent course, really inspiring.

This all made a lot more sense to me than other methods of teaching literacy.

We’d got stuck where to go to next! Useful and entertaining.

Excellent course, once again.

Enjoyable and very informative.

Thank you for a good day. It has helped as a Year 6 teacher to show how it can be used cross-curricularly and to extend children. It’s quite difficult to keep up focus and continue to take in so much new information in just one day. Although somehow you have done it!

Excellent second day. Consolidates work with children. Good recap. Brisk pace. Fascinating.

Very valuable for giving ideas about how to practise skills in classroom. Consolidated the learning from Day 1. I feel a lot more secure and confident about teaching THRASS.

The second session was good – moving on the information from last time and our own practice. Lots of great ideas to go back to the classroom. Only criticism was the afternoon was very long – because of the amount of information, we needed a break to collect our thoughts. Thanks for a great day.

An illuminating course, but would welcome more information on using with Reception children.

Followed on well from previous training a few months ago. How to apply this up the school in a bit more detail – if you were starting from scratch – I realise it will get easier as the scheme ‘takes off’.

Both days excellent. Second session seemed much more difficult to follow, I had questions throughout. They were small queries. My gut feeling is THRASS makes perfect sense but it will take me a long time to feel at all proficient. I also feel reading and books are of paramount importance in learning, so if this helps children, particularly boys to read, it is worth it’s weight in gold! Also it is not just us that are having to learn to look at things in new way (4 year olds are difficult to re-teach).

Very good – although too much information. Would be helpful to break down – early years, KS1, KS2.

Excellent consolidation! (and needed). Very helpful to know about the explanations e.g. allophones.

Having begun teaching, the day was able to support and consolidate aspects for my teaching. Parts of the synthetic teaching went over my head, having not got into this section as yet. NPS – Is this not the same as saying “silent e”? [“No, they are not the same. A split digraph (your “silent e”) is a grapheme, that is, the two letters represent a sound/phoneme. Spellings that are NPS (Not Playing Sensibly) are not graphemes, because the letter or letters represent more than one phoneme or they are abbreviations e.g. ‘x’ in box and ‘d’ ‘r’ in Dr.” Alan]
Great day. Lots to take in but should be o.k. once using at home with my own children and at school. We have really enjoyed working with THRASS at home.

As LSA supporting either one child or small group, found some of lesson demonstrations very useful. Interactive demos - Fantastic. LSA’s don’t have the opportunity to use SMART Boards at the moment, but aids general understanding. As a parent, also think fantastic system for teaching literacy.

Another good, informative day. I think the resources are very good. It’s been interesting having a ‘Phoneme Table’ in class. Looking forward to continuing with the programme.

Enjoyable and interesting. Thank you for making the two days fun and interactive.

Useful to have techniques reinforced and have new ones introduced. Day felt useful and feel it was accessible and flexible for my age group. The day prompted discussion with my year colleagues about how we move forward with the scheme and adapt to suit our children.

Good reinforcement of previous training session. Feel more confident with articulation plus key skills relevant to age group. Ready to try and use Phoneme Machine in class! Interesting and relevant points covered throughout day. Now I can use really big words to impress people!

A good revision on what we did last time. Found it interesting.

Good to be reminded of articulation. I must remember! Useful to be taken through use of all resources.

Feel more confident about how it all works – will be able to help and encourage my own KS2 child.

Very useful in terms of lots of ideas being presented for teaching, which we needed in upper KS2. Perhaps you could go a little bit more slowly, I had trouble following all of it – my subject knowledge is still “developing”. Overall, though, very interesting – I really agree with your teaching philosophy.

New developments in Phoneme Machine look very useful. Very informative with lots to inform teaching.

Very good – really enjoyed it – lots of information to take in. It will definitely improve my teaching.

My understanding has increased. Helpful teaching tips so feel more confident in how to challenge children. Know that the main step is to use the programme to support small groups.

Very helpful – by consolidating the previous session (and having had some time to apply it since then), and being so clear in giving 360 degree ways of working across the primary phase – lots of questions answered and again great presentation. New software - very desirable. Thanks to Alan and also Mike!

A very informative course. The idea behind teaching phonic skills this way makes a lot more sense than teaching children 26 sounds and that each letter represents one sound. I think this scheme will benefit our children’s literacy skills immensely and I will be using it on my own children.

Enjoyable and useful.

Thec uoss a vewrea ggudd qauss! Thank you.

Very informative with lots of ideas on how to help the children enjoy THRASS.

I felt better prepared for Day 2 than I did for Day 1, as I was already familiar with the charts. Good, lively presentation which kept up the interest level. Very informative.

Very inspiring and informative course. I found it extremely useful having a gap between the two days. It gave me enough time to digest and use all that I had learnt on the first day.

Another excellent day with lots of practical ideas for making the delivery of information fun.

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