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A little THRASS help?
Submitted by Admin (09-11-2012)
Hello there, just joined, great resource and forum.
I have been teaching THRASS for a term now to years 3-6 students with literacy difficulties, they have phonological awareness now, and can find things on the chart (though still slowly), but I noticed through testing at the end of the term that grapheme choices are still very poor.
Any ideas on where to go with this. I am a little lost in my direction and unfortunately my THRASS follow up training was cancelled due to lack of attendance :(
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Hi Sue
I was trained in THRASS mid-way through last term. I am a beginning teacher on kindergarten, just wondering if you have any pointers for me? I have changed the way I teach sounds completely, as I previously taught a sound a week.
Thanks.
I have used THRASS for many years, and I think it is brilliant, but have found some teachers have little success because they do not refer to it throughout the day and use terms such as grapheme choice as in whatever the phoneme is.
I found it still helpful to use the old fashioned word lists for a particular grapheme choice eg 'ee' as in tree - for practise and consolidation. Dianna Rigg is also advocating a similar system I found. She is one of the WA literacy specialists in case you haven't heard of her.
Thanks Sue, explicit spelling is an area I can focus alot more on, I currently take spelling words from their free writing so that I know they are letters that they personally use frequently, but this does need a tweak, as there is no consistent focus for their words.
I stopped using lists of all one phoneme in the past as I felt there were alot of words being used they will not often use, and I found alot of mistakes happening (especially with those who do not spend time practicing their words) due to the student getting the graphemes mixed up.
I would then repeat these incorrect words the next week, and for one or two students the same words would get repeated week after week.
I blame this a little on the fact if they get it wrong each week, this is the spelling that becomes fluent, as they do not try to learn the correct spelling unless I rammed it into them, which mostly created animosity rather than cooperation.
Thanks again for your feed back, I will trial some focus phoneme word lists again.
Hi
It is great the students now have some phonemic awareness. I am assuming they have the alphabet knowledge too. Don't be disheartened if your results are not as high as you would hope. It is only one term and if the students have previously been taught one letter makes one sound, then it will take some time for the students to automatically recall the way you have taught them.
Now is the time to focus on teaching the graphemes. I focus on a phoneme a week and teach the grapheme choices through the keywords and through words the students have in their spelling list.
For example, if the phoneme is /e/ as in bed and bread, I would have words that have /e/ spelt as e and /e/ spelt as ea. I also have the less common spellings.
For older students I use these words as base words and work with affixes to build vocabulary and grammar. For younger students I use their sight words also.
The phoneme/grapheme relationship must be explicitly taught - as is required in all spelling lessons. I am happy to share with you what I do, as I have been implementing a phoneme-based spelling programme across my school for a number of years.
regards
Sue
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