THRASS
THRASS is an acronym for ‘Teaching Handwriting, Reading and Spelling Skills’. It is a key teaching strategy used at East Maitland Public School for the teaching of literacy. It is a phonetics teaching tool that is designed to be explicit taught, fun for children, and linguistically correct.
Research, which can be further explored at https://www.thrass.com.au/research/ has found that THRASS charts are the most widely used resource in schools and contribute to significant improvement for students’ phonological knowledge and learning. Each phoneme box on a THRASS chart shows the most common spelling choices for a speech sound. For example, the graph ‘c’ as in ‘cat’, ‘k’ as in ‘kitten’, ‘ck’ as in ‘duck’ and ‘q’ as in ‘queen’ can all represent the same sound.
This knowledge assists children in being able to make correct spelling choices, as well as positively impact their decoding when reading. Each classroom at our school is equipped with large THRASS charts displaying the 44 phonemes of the English language, as well as individual A4-sized THRASS charts for each child to use as a reference tool.
