THRASS is an explicit teaching method that focuses on helping learners gain a logical understanding for the building blocks of literacy through:

- an awareness of the 44 phonemes of spoken English and the associated     grapheme choices

- an awareness for graphs, digraphs, trigraphs

- knowledge of the alphabet, and the naming of the lower-case letters and their capitals

- using correct terminology from the very beginning e.g. letter/s, letter name/s,  digraph, trigraph, grapheme, word

- an awareness that the alphabet is a resource from which letters are selected to represent the phonemes of spoken English

As of 2010, students from Kindergarten to Year six at Ulmarra will be taught spelling using the THRASS program. This is to ensure that all students receive a sequenced program using the same structure and language in order to build on the knowledge gained during the previous year.