At Grayston Preparatory School, Gauteng, Johannesburg the learning of reading and spelling using the THRASS programme is integrated right across the curriculum, meaning that THRASS can be used not just with younger children but also all the way up to Grade 7.  

This video provides an excellent opportunity to see THRASS being used with children of all ages. At the beginning of the video we see children in Grade R working on Picture Location with their picturecharts to identify the various parts of the body, clothes and actions. In Grade 1, where the children have been working on spelling choices, even children who are new to the school and are doing THRASS for the first time are coping really well. Already they are able to identify consonant and vowel phonemes and the various types of graphemes. 

We then move on to the Grade 3 children, who are learning to identify the first vowel phoneme in a word in preparation for using the THRASS Dictionary that contains the ‘THRASS 500’ basewords. They are analysing and synthesising words using the Phoneme-Grapheme Cards and the Phoneme Machine software (using the class interactive whiteboard). Amazingly, they are even able to cope with relatively difficult words such as hippopotamus!  

THRASS is even being used in a Grade 4 science lesson where the children are learning about fruit and vegetables, while the children in Grade 5 are having a lot of fun learning by playing the THRASS leapfrog quiz. What is so striking, is how enthusiastic all the children are to join in, whatever their age. 

The Headmaster of Grayston, Mark Hayter, believes that, in order to improve literacy, you have to pick a programme as a country, apply it to the curriculum development, get the right skills in place and train the staff in the various schools. He believes that THRASS would be a highly effective programme for achieving this, especially for second and third language speakers. 

At Grayston, the children are tested annually at the end of November, when the school has a careful look at the ratio gains that they are making. The Grade 5 children who have been involved in the THRASS programme since 2006 had been tested the previous day and 90% of them had been found to be above their chronological age on spelling, with a good number of children three or more years ahead in their spelling age.