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Welcome back to THRASS GOES LIVE! We have finally come to the end of our
exciting journey which has taken us from the Kwena Basin Farm Schools in the
MPUMALANGA province of South Africa via Johannesburg, Orange Farm township,
Birmingham, Conwy and Cardiff to MILTON KEYNES.
By tuning in to our regular videostreams from locations in South Africa and the
UK you have been able to follow our journey and see how quickly children learn
as they use THRASS and how impressed the educators, student teachers and
Government Ministers have been. Now that we have come to the end of that
journey, we would like to invite you to look back at some of the highlights with
us.
We started our journey in the Kwena Basin Farm Schools, where both the educators
and the student teachers from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
were amazed at how easy and how flexible THRASS was, how much the children
really loved using the THRASS resources and how quickly they learnt. The student
teachers loved being in the Farm schools and were amazed at their own ability to
achieve so much with THRASS after so little training. They were also extremely
moved by the fact that the children, who had so little and were living in such
difficult surroundings, were so keen to learn.
We then moved on to a two-day certificate course and a keynote address for the
National Union of Educators (NUE) at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg. There we heard Dr Jean Place, Principal Tutor at the University,
introduce Alan Davies as a true professional whose enthusiasm inspires all who
come into contact with him and whose ability to challenge, to risk, to be
flexible and to empower his learners set him in a class of his own. The NUE
members were extremely impressed by the course and this was reflected in their
course evaluations.
We then returned to the Kwena Basin Farm Schools, this time with a group of
educators from the UK, Ghana and South Africa and saw how amazed they were at
the children’s rate of progress and how moved they were by the children’s
unbelievable desire to learn, in spite of the difficult environment in which
they live and the considerable distance some of them have to walk to school.
From the Kwena Basin the party of educators and delegates to a two-day THRASS
course went on to visit two schools in Johannesburg, St Peter’s Preparatory
School and Bellavista Remedial School, where we saw a series of demonstration
lessons. We heard with amazement how at St Peter’s within a year THRASS,
combined with paired reading where older boys teach boys three years their
junior, had produced some stunning results with a 60 per cent increase in
pupils’ spelling ages and a considerable increase in their reading ages.
We then attended the launch of the THRASS SMART Project, which is jointly
sponsored by THRASS UK and SMART Technologies Inc and represents the very latest
in education technology - the groundbreaking THRASS Phoneme Machine on an
interactive SMART Board. The launch took place at Masibambane College in Orange
Farm township near Soweto and there we heard Mandla Maseko, Chief Education
Specialist, Children and Youth Literacy, Department of Education, South African
Government speaking about his Government’s intention to consider how it can use
a programme such as THRASS to benefit the majority of South Africans in public
schools. And it was amazing to see the children, whose first language is either
Zulu or Sotho, using the Phoneme Machine on the SMART Board to teach English to
the adult visitors.
The final leg of our journey brought us back to the UK with a group of student
teachers from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and Dr Jean
Place for a two-week tour of primary schools. The student teachers wanted to see
how THRASS was taught in schools in the UK. They visited Hollywood Primary
School in Birmingham, schools in Conwy, North Wales, and Windsor Clive Infants
School in Cardiff. They were impressed by the quality of the teaching and the
way that THRASS was integrated into lessons. They were also impressed by the
enthusiasm of the teachers and how helpful they were to them and to each other.
The student teachers were surprised that they had managed to form so close a
bond with the children over so short a period of time. And everyone who met the
student teachers was impressed with their professional approach and the way that
they had risen to the challenge of the responsibility they had been given.
Our journey ended at Oxley Park Primary School in Milton Keynes. There, visitors
to the Open Day told us how impressed they were with THRASS, with its
versatility, with the interactive and multi-sensory approach it involves, and
how successful it is for teaching dyslexics and children with special
educational needs. The Open Day included a series of THRASS demonstration
lessons, including one with Alan Davies using the Phoneme Machine on a SMART
Board (the full version of this lesson will be available for download).
Before they left to return to South Africa we heard the student teachers
reflecting on what had impressed them most during the UK tour: they had been
amazed at just how much the children get out of THRASS and by the bonding and
real friendship that exists between the children and the teachers; and they had
been really impressed by the classroom management skills of the teachers they
had seen in action. And one of them described the THRASS Phoneme Machine as the
greatest thing there could ever be for teaching children for whom English is a
second language.
We would like to thank you for travelling with us over the past few weeks and for
giving us your support.
If you would like to view the videostream of the highlights of our journey,
click on the link below the pictures on the left.
Goes Live! Index
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