How Once aligns to LETRS objectives

Once Alignment

During instructor orientation, the Once team covers the downward trend in NAEP scores and discusses the lifelong consequences of not being able to read well. We emphasize how learning in early stages is key to student success.

Once Alignment

During in-person orientation, the Once team refers to research on the science of reading. During on-going development with instructors, coaches share relevant research as needed about the rationale behind program-design choices.

Once Alignment

The Once team introduces instructors to the use of specialized orthography and its rationale, explaining how to use it and how it accelerates access to our "opaque" alphabetic orthography.

Once Alignment

Instructors are trained to use the Once curriculum, which addresses the decoding/word-recognition domain of SVR (phonemic awareness, orthographic mapping, blending, structures/patterns) and the language-comp domain (vocab development, syntax).

Once Alignment

The one-on-one format of the Once program allows instructors to attend to the specific language comprehension needs of each student as they work through the reading curriculum.

Once Alignment

The scripted format ensures that instructors use standardized, consistent, and clear terminology to support student reading development.

Once Alignment

The Once program teaches students finger tracking to decode words by their individual sounds. Instructors receive ongoing development by coaches to ensure that this practice is implemented throughout. The Once program does not use any whole-language approaches like those suggested by the Three-Cueing Systems model.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

The Once program addresses all strands of Scarborough's Reading Rope through a variety of tasks that recur with increasing complexity as the student progresses through the curriculum cycles. Language Comprehension — Background Knowledge: Students are asked literal comprehension questions in Story Reading. Vocabulary: Students hear example sentences for every word they learn to read. Language Structures: Students read different syntax, punctuation, and dialogue in Story Reading. Verbal Reasoning: Students are asked inferential questions in Story Reading. Literacy Knowledge: Students learn print concepts like finger tracking, reading left to right and top to bottom, distinguishing between letters and words. Word Recognition — Phonological Awareness: Students segment and blend words in the Slow and Fast Game tasks, use different onsets for rhyming words, and recognize common parts of words in Word Parts. Decoding: Students learn to decode individual sounds in the New Sound and Sound Review tasks. They also learn to write each sound in Writing tasks. Sight Recognition: Students specifically learn sight recognition of irregular words in the Irregulars tasks.

Once Alignment

In the beginning stages of the Once program, students learn to read words written in specialized orthography, which allows them to access phonetic words as well as many non-phonetic, high-frequency words early on in order to develop a foundation built on alphabetic principles. When the students' decoding skills are stronger, we introduce them to regular serif font and to irregular words that require more sight reading. We teach 28 irregular words in the first 100 cycles and 188 irregular words in the next 100 cycles. By prioritizing decoding skills and not introducing too many irregular words early on in the process, we enable students to remain engaged and to confidently try to sound words out and their reading fluency grows.

Once Alignment

The one-on-one format of the Once program allows instructors to cater to the individual needs of each student in order to develop the early-reading skills needed for successful reading comprehension.

Once Alignment

Many of our partners use Once with all of their kindergarteners (Tier I), as we recommend, not only because they understand that Once will accelerate all students' learning but also because they understand that waiting to see which students need Tier-3 intervention means waiting until it is too late to lay a proper early-reading foundation for those students. By the time you know who is struggling, they are already behind, and catching up is difficult, expensive, and often unsuccessful. Providing Once to the whole grade ensures that those who need it most will receive it in time.

Once Alignment

One-on-one instruction allows instructors to differentiate their pacing through the curriculum according to students' needs. The curriculum directs them to provide additional corrections and repetitions when needed so that students can progress as fast as they can or as slowly as they need to, depending on the students' mastery.

Once Alignment

Once is designed for students at the beginning of their schooling because research clearly shows the benefits of early intervention and prevention, and it shows the dire consequences of missing the chance to get it right the first time. The Once team emphasizes the importance of investing in this type of instruction during in-person training and ongoing coaching sessions with instructors. Instructors witness the undeniable benefits of our program each time they work directly with students using the Once program.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

During initial onboarding, we frequently address questions about how instructors can best support students to succeed on the district's benchmark reading assessment.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

The Once program was designed in accordance with the latest cognitive science about humans' phonological processing system. Studies about phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, phonology, and phonetics were instrumental in the development of our curriculum.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Once uses phonemic awareness activities that develop students' ability to distinguish similar sounds, articulate tricky sounds, blend onsets and rimes, tackle complex consonant blends, and segment words with various structures. We connect these tasks to the activities that include reading the symbols associated with the sounds. These tasks also develop general phonological processing speed and phonological working memory (PWM). We do not address "advanced" phonemic awareness tasks (like substitution and deletion) for which there is little evidence that it is requisite for reading development.

Once Alignment

Once uses phonemic awareness activities that develop students' ability to distinguish similar sounds, articulate tricky sounds, blend onsets and rimes, tackle complex consonant blends, and segment words with various structures. We connect these tasks to the activities that include reading the symbols associated with the sounds.

Once Alignment

In the early stages of Once's instructional content, we represent sounds with symbols in a specialized orthography that helps beginning readers learn letter-sound correspondence more quickly. By the middle stages of our program, the specialized orthography is phased out and replaced by the Times New Roman serif font, chosen because it is one of the most common font styles seen in print. The specialized orthography helps students learn more quickly the tricky aspects of conventional orthography, like digraphs, vowel teams, -VCe patterns, and derivatives. Because the specialized orthography allows students to decode so many words so much earlier, students get to read a host of sentences and stories in which they can practice other reading skills.

Once Alignment

In our initial in-person training and our ongoing instructor development through coaching, Once ensures that instructors can produce the accurate sounds required to teach students. We teach instructors to attend to differences in the voicing and articulatory gestures of consonants. We pay special attention to the distinction between continuous and stop phonemes because those have a significant impact on the ability of students to blend those sounds into whole words. In the early stages of our curriculum, we include symbols beneath each sound to indicate whether it's a continuous or stop phoneme in order to help students decode the words.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum includes embedded audio recordings of sounds and words to support students as they learn to distinguish and produce vowel sounds. These are especially useful for English learners. The one-on-one nature of this instruction allows instructors to give targeted feedback on sound production, and to give sufficient reps of hearing and producing sounds, which would be very difficult to do in a whole-class or even small-group setting.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum includes phonetic spellings and audio recordings for most sounds and words in the curriculum to help instructors model correctly, teach in a standardized way, and recognize errors that require correction.

Once Alignment

We provide audio buttons that play Spanish versions of key instructions to make sure that Spanish-speaking students will understand how to interact with a given task. We employ a number of strategies to support English Learners and dialect speakers, including modeling, tone, extra time, gestures, images and illustrations, comprehension discussions, the gradual and strategic increase of rigor, repeated readings, and co-reading.

Once Alignment

While the Once program includes some encoding and spelling practice, the curriculum focuses mostly on phonics and decoding practice because those are the skills that benefit most from the specialized one-on-one instruction that Once provides.

Once Alignment

We believe all early elementary students benefit from some amount of phonological and phonemic awareness instruction. Since we are individually paced, each student will spend a different amount of time on this type of instruction depending on that student's needs.

Once Alignment

Once uses phonemic awareness activities that develop students' ability to distinguish similar sounds, articulate tricky sounds, blend onsets and rimes, tackle complex consonant blends, and segment words with various structures. These tasks also develop general phonological processing speed and phonological working memory (PWM).

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Once specifically teaches phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words in order to support word recognition.

Once Alignment

The overwhelming research consensus about the critical nature of phonics instruction informed the design of the Once program. Our curriculum offers explicit, systematic, and cumulative instruction in phonics.

Once Alignment

The Once program provides code-emphasis instruction in alignment with the scientific evidence. Contrary to a common belief among teachers, this type of instruction can be engaging and empowering for students, depending on how it is taught. Our students love their Once sessions, evidenced by their reading progress and their smiles.

Once Alignment

Once's lessons include spiraling, phonemic awareness, guided practice, individual practice, and word meaning, so they are closely aligned to the General Phonics Lesson Plan.

Once Alignment

During orientation, we make sure that instructors understand key concepts of the phoneme-grapheme correspondence system, like that multiple letters often represent one sound (like /th/ or the vowel sound in 'caught'). The morphophonemic orthography of the English language can confuse adults into thinking that spelling and sound are aligned in cases where they aren't, so we help instructors avoid those mistakes in their instruction.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum gradually and strategically increases the complexity of word structures that students work with, from CVC to CCCVCC, to build their skills one step at a time. We're even strategic about words within those categories. For example, CVCC words with continuous-stop structures would be taught in a strategic order of increasing difficulty, as in the order of the words "fish," "raft," and "tilt."

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum leads students from Ehri's prealphabetic phase through their partial alphabetic phase and into their full alphabetic phase. After a year of Once instruction, students should be able to begin their consolidated alphabetic phase earlier than most students and with a more solid foundation.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Our students practice letter formation (writing) as a part of every cycle. The Once program prioritizes sounds over letter names because studies show that students tend to learn letter names during whole-classroom instruction. It is much more effective for our instructors to spend their daily 15 minutes with each student working on other skills needed for reading.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

We strategically space out introducing students to sound-symbol correspondences that are commonly confused, like 'b' and 'd', to help students distinguish between them.

Once Alignment

We use the practice of connected phonation to support students' blending skills. We train instructors to use a flowchart to respond to students when they struggle to blend when reading words. The protocol ensures that students develop this crucial skill.

Once Alignment

Word practice routines like "word lists" and "word families" are an important part of the Once curriculum.

Once Alignment

In the Once curriculum, the instructor reads an example sentence for every word students read in every task except for Story Reading tasks, which have the words already as part of sentences of the story. If a word appears in more than one task, it will have sentences that reflect other meanings and uses of that word.

Once Alignment

With a heavy focus on decoding, Once teaches the close relationship between reading and spelling.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

High-frequency words are taught through auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modalities.

Once Alignment

Once provides 100+ printed decodable booklets that align precisely to the scope and sequence of the Once curriculum. They give students ample opportunity to practice the specific skills that students have learned in their Once sessions. The decodable booklets include colorful, engaging illustrations, but they do not require the picture-based guesswork for students to be able to decode the text.

Once Alignment

The 200 stories in Once are episodes of an epic narrative featuring a consistent cast of characters. These episodes grow in complexity as students' skills develop. Once teaches students words in isolation before including them in texts, and students answer increasingly challenging comprehension questions about the texts as they progress through the Once sequence.

Once Alignment

Once tracks the length of each session, each student's rate of progress, and each student's oral reading fluency in order to evaluate instruction. Once also provides instructional coaches with a video library of every instructional session so that they can tailor their coaching to each instructor's and student's individual needs.

Once Alignment

All instructional materials in Once were designed in-house to support systematic, explicit, code-based instruction.

Once Alignment

The second half of the Once scope and sequence focuses extensively on morphology and structural analysis.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum covers position-based orthographic conventions like those for the minor-'c' and minor-'g' sounds, the /ŋ/ sound, and y-derivatives.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

While our curriculum does not teach students to name syllable types because of the age of the students that we are targeting, Once students do practice reading all syllable types and also many multisyllabic words.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Once students will learn much more about strategies for tackling multisyllabic words in later grades, but Once lays a strong foundation for that work by teaching students to recognize letter combinations and affixes and by exposing them to many multisyllabic words.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

The second half of the Once scope and sequence focuses extensively on morphology and structural analysis.

Once Alignment

The Patterns tasks of the Once curriculum teach students to read words that follow these suffix-addition rules.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Once separately measures oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. Coaching sessions focus extensively on students' oral reading fluency and reading comprehension and where coaches and instructors are seeing divergences.

Once Alignment

Coaches at Once review oral reading fluency data for each student and then bring that insight to coaching meetings with instructors. A low ORF score might, for example, indicate that an instructor needs to take more time to correct and spiral with a particular student to ensure mastery of one concept or skill before moving on to a new one, and the coach can guide the instructor toward doing that more effectively.

Once Alignment

Techniques for building word, sentence, and passage reading fluency are incorporated into the Once curriculum, like speed drills, modeling, simultaneous reading, repeated reading, etc. They are easily implemented by instructors teaching the program.

Once Alignment

Since our instructional sessions are recorded, coaches at Once can focus extensively on phonological, phonics, and fluency data to inform coaching which improves instruction.

Once Alignment

Suggested pacing in Once is deeply dependent on the data Once tracks on pacing, oral reading fluency, and comprehension.

Once Alignment

All instructional content and practices in Once are designed based on alignment with available scientific evidence. We are a "code-emphasis" program, not a "meaning-emphasis" program.

Once Alignment

Our curriculum offers explicit, systematic, and cumulative instruction.

Once Alignment

All instructional content and practices in Once are designed based on alignment with available scientific evidence.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

The Once scripted instructional content focuses on providing breadth and depth of word knowledge to aid reading comprehension. For example, the curriculum introduces new words to broaden students' lexicons, and exposes students to the multiple meanings of many words in order to deepen it.

Once Alignment

By providing multiple contact points with each word and multiple uses of each word in context, Once cultivates deep knowledge of words.

Once Alignment

As instructors provide instruction they look at students' oral and visual clues to informally assess student vocabulary. They will also explicitly ask students questions to more formally assess word comprehension.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Once focuses on Tier-1 and Tier-2 vocabulary words.

Once Alignment

When English Learners learn a word in Once, they will hear the word in a sentence or multiple sentences if they do not understand the first sentence. If the instructor speaks the student's native language, the instructor can translate the unfamiliar word. Students will then encounter the word in a story or multiple stories which will be accompanied by illustrations.

Once Alignment

In Once students will often decode a list of words before reading those words in a story.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Once's morphology tasks and word-structure tasks help students explore the semantic relationships between words.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum includes many tasks that teach words in relation to other words, such as those that teach about base words and their endings, words that follow -VCe pattern rules, and words with shared morphology.

Once Alignment

The fact that Once's curriculum is scripted allows us to upgrade the quality of the discourse between the instructor and the student. We ensure that the instructor's communication is rich which contributes to students' vocabulary growth.

Once Alignment

Once spirals all instructional content so students practice vocabulary before and after reading a passage.

Once Alignment

In the Once curriculum, the instructor reads an example sentence for every word students read in every task except for Story Reading tasks, which have the words already as part of sentences of the story.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum has questions scripted for the instructor to ask the student at specific points in the story text to check and develop comprehension before, during, and after reading.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Before students first encounter a word within the text of a Story Reading task, they have already practiced reading that word and hearing that word in context during a prior Word Reading task.

Once Alignment

Our curriculum teaches students about all sentence types and structures and gives ample opportunity to practice reading each. Our students learn about syntactic punctuation and how that affects prosody. Our students even learn how to read and comprehend dialogue with speech tags in various positions.

Once Alignment

Students read their first sentence in Cycle 9 and practice sentence-level understanding in every Story Reading task in every cycle from that point on through Cycle 200.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum anticipates areas of confusion and is scripted accordingly to allow instructors to teach those areas clearly and to provide appropriate corrections when needed.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

Students encounter 300 narrative tasks as they progress through the Once instructional content and learn to recognize structural patterns.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum is systematically designed and scripted to allow the instructor to effectively teach foundational skills and language comprehension with increasing complexity to each student. Each of the 200 cycles of the Once program includes separate tasks with different purposes. Some of the tasks teach foundational skills, such as phonological awareness, decoding, graphemes, and morphology, while others focus more on language comprehension. Together, all of the tasks work to increase both foundational skills and language comprehension simultaneously.

Once Alignment

All texts provided in Once (on-screen and in printed decodables) are high quality. They contain morals, address enduring understandings, contain layers of meaning, allow multiple interpretations, include artful diction and syntax, are relevant and age appropriate, and warrant re-reading.

Once Alignment

Once exclusively teaches comprehension strategies that are supported by research.

Once Alignment

The Once program has scripted strategies that the instructor can use as needed to address certain common difficulties that arise during instruction. Instructors are also guided by coaches in order to improve their strategies and ask for specific help as needed.

Once Alignment

The Once program has scripted strategies that the instructor can use as needed to address certain common difficulties that arise during instruction.

Once Alignment

Because of the one-to-one teacher-student ratio in the Once program, the teacher is able to ensure each student's engagement at every point of the curriculum before advancing. Instructors effectively model how to ask questions because they are scripted into each Story Reading task before, during, and after reading story text. In addition, the one-to-one ratio allows the teacher to receive any questions that the student might have along the way.

Once Alignment

Students are frequently encouraged to ask questions while reading texts in Once. Since instruction is one-on-one, reticent students are more likely to ask questions than they would be in a larger group setting.

Once Alignment

The relationship between querying and students' mental model of text deeply informs the construction of Once's instructional content.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum has scripted questions to ask at critical points of the story text.

Once Alignment

In every Story Reading task, students must re-read the last part of the story before reading the new section. They are also asked questions that will likely require them to go back and re-read the text to find the answer.

Once Alignment

The narrative text of the Once curriculum is a complete storyline with recurring characters who go on different adventures. There are continuous threads that are woven from beginning to end that students encounter as they progress. This enforces the students' ability to recognize themes, character traits, and lessons that occur over time.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum includes scripted comprehension questions that are not only about getting the right answer. Instead, they are written to allow for many types of responses. They are designed to help students deepen their comprehension as they read, to enthusiastically engage with the story itself, and to re-read text as needed to find an answer.

Once Alignment

The Story Reading tasks, in which students read narrative texts, include scripted comprehension questions each time.

Once Alignment

Outside the scope of the Once program.

Once Alignment

The Once curriculum is scripted in Standard American English with audio recordings of each sound and word, so every instructor knows exactly how to teach and say every part of the curriculum.

Once Alignment

Because the Once program is one-on-one, all instruction happens at the pace specific to each student's needs and abilities. This allows the instructor ultimate flexibility to slow down or move more quickly depending on the student.

Once Alignment

Because the Once program is one-on-one, all instruction happens at the pace specific to each student's needs and abilities. This allows the instructor ultimate flexibility to slow down or move more quickly depending on the student.