The video opens with Laraine Roberts, Principal of Holy Rosary School, welcoming everyone to the Open Day. She welcomes in particular Sister Hilda, who is Head of Holy Rosary Mission School in Malamulele, and Sister Cora from the Order of the Holy Rosary that founded the school. The school actually had no power earlier in the morning. It’s now come back on but they’ve got a generator on stand-by just in case! 

Lesley Stanbridge, the THRASS Co-ordinator, then tells us why Holy Rosary School chose to use THRASS: because it’s a spelling and reading programme that appeals to so many different learning styles, it’s a whole-school programme and it involves a lot of fun, which is so often missing from school; and children learn automatically when they’re having fun. With the introduction of THRASS the pupils became confident, the spelling of pupils of all abilities improved enormously, some by as much as 22 months in a year, and they all really liked THRASS.   

The beauty of THRASS is that it isn’t too prescriptive, which allows teachers to adapt it to the needs of their pupils, and a number of teachers then explain and demonstrate how they use THRASS for a range of different age groups and how it differs from the way they used to be taught. 

The video includes a whole range of demonstration lessons with pupils working with the SING-A-LONG Interactive Book and Picturecharts, Phoneme-Grapheme Cards and Picture Cards. And we also see them THRASSing out words. What is so striking is just how confident and competent they all are.