Orientation
Last updated
Last updated
Welcome to Once!
Once is a scripted early-reading curriculum meant for you to use with students one-on-one, in person. Students do not need any prior knowledge about reading to participate successfully in this program. The one-on-one format allows you to adjust the pace of instruction according to students’ needs. Students should progress through the curriculum as fast as they can or as slowly as they need to.
Students can begin learning to read even before they have mastered all of their sounds in speech. Children naturally learn to articulate certain sounds before others. Your student may not pronounce the /r/, /l/, or /th/ sounds in a mature way yet, and that may be developmentally appropriate for them. If a student pronounces rug as /rĹg/ (the standard way) in conversation, then you should correct them if they read r as anything other than the sound /r/. If, on the other hand, they pronounce rug as /wĹg/ in conversation, you don’t need to correct them when they read r as the sound /w/ since that is just how they pronounce that sound for now. As their pronunciation of /r/ matures, it will remain connected to the r symbol, and students will read that symbol with the correct sound in the future.
The right-hand pane is the instructor pane. Throughout this curriculum, the instructor pane provides the information, directions, and scripting that you need to successfully teach each student.
The larger left-hand pane is the student pane. In that pane, students are presented with symbols, words, stories, and illustrations that change as they engage in different types of tasks. Students will often be asked to touch the screen in the student pane to point out punctuation, count words, or slide their finger beneath what they read. Because of this, it is important that you turn off any touch-screen capabilities (if your device has them) for the duration of the session.
In the right-hand pane, words written in black text give directions for you to follow and information to help you prepare. You should not read black text aloud to students.
Blue text is the script that you must say aloud to students.
Purple text is what you should say only if you need to correct a student who makes a particular type of error.
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A purple diamond highlights the steps that should be taken if a correction is needed.
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This icon ensures that you don’t miss the subtle changes in how tasks are taught as they develop in complexity throughout the curriculum.
For each sound or word taught in the curriculum, there are corresponding circular buttons with the image of a speaker on them. Clicking these buttons will play audio recordings of how those sounds or words should be pronounced.
Sometimes sounds or words should be said slowly and sometimes fast. Yellow audio buttons model the slow way, with each continuous sound being held for two seconds. Green audio buttons model the fast way, with sounds being said at a normal rate of speech.
Yellow means slow.
Green means fast.
You do not have to use the audio buttons when teaching a student.
However, if you are not yet pronouncing the sounds in precisely the way they are said in the recordings, you should use the buttons to model the correct sounds for the student rather than speaking those sounds yourself.
When correcting the mistake of pausing between sounds, you will often need to “isolate the error,” which means you will have the student read just the two sounds they are pausing between. If they struggle to do so, you will then “model it,” which means you will read just those two sounds the slow way without pausing in between them.
Usually, the problematic pause occurs between the first two sounds of the word. For this reason, in some tasks, each word that is longer than two sounds also has a corresponding yellow audio button of just the first two sounds being read the slow way. You can use this button as needed when you are using the flowchart to correct students who are pausing between the first two sounds of a word.
The Once curriculum is organized into 200 cycles. Each cycle consists of distinct tasks, such as New Sound, Sound Review, Word Reading, Story Reading, and Writing. Each type of task focuses on a different skill and becomes more complex as students’ skills develop. Tasks vary in length. Some might be only one page long while others might consist of multiple pages. When a student is ready to move to the next page in a task, simply type the down or right arrow on your keyboard (or click anywhere on the screen) to advance to the next page. gives you a visual overview of how to interpret and interact with what you see on the screen while using this curriculum.
For your students to succeed, it is essential that you consistently maintain a high standard for correctness. Each task will explain what a correct response should sound like and whether a student is ready to advance. In general, students will need to say or read certain sounds in a certain way. For Writing tasks, meeting the standard for correctness means that students make the correct sound for the symbol that they are learning to write. It does not mean that students have to write those symbols perfectly. To help students achieve mastery in a task, you should correct students’ mistakes immediately, and—at the end of each task—have students repeat any sounds or words that required correction. give you step-by-step guidance on how to effectively correct mistakes that students commonly make.
A black bullet point indicates something you should do at that moment.
In tasks where students are reading whole words, like in Word Reading and Story Reading, the two most common mistakes they make are saying the wrong sound and pausing between sounds. To correct these mistakes, you will follow the steps in the .
To hear a demonstration of each phoneme, or sound, see
Once provides printed decodable books, writing worksheets, and calendars. To print these resources on your own, navigate to and look under the resources menu.
