Two-Blue (BB)

What is a BB Reader?

The Two-Blue reader knows to look for the known inside the unknown. Two-Blue readers have their fingers on the text, covering up beginnings and endings of unfamiliar words, looking for vowel patterns, common endings, compound words, etc., as they successfully figure out the two-syllable words common to Two-Blue text. Catch Two-Blue readers laughing at the stories, not just figuring out what the words are.

Standards-based Objectives for BB

Wide Reading and Motivation

• Reads regularly and independently in the BB Reading Zone for at least 15 minutes every day in the classroom without fatigue
• Has established a home reading habit and reads for at least 15 minutes each night
• Reads fiction, nonfiction, and poetry

Phonemic Awareness/Phonics/Decoding/Word Solving Strategies

• Orally segments a multisyllable word into its syllables
• Notices, stops reading, and uses repair strategies when something doesn’t look right, sound right, or make sense
• Decodes almost any two-syllable word that follows a regular vowel pattern (window) or is built from familiar chunks (crispy)

Fluency

• Reads comfortably with expression, demonstrating an understanding of both content and punctuation
• Reads with 98–100% accuracy in BB-level texts, self-correcting all errors that interfere with meaning
• Sub-vocalizes or reads with a whisper voice

Vocabulary and Background Knowledge

• Knows 300–500 high frequency words by sight and can use them as “islands of certainty” while reading in BB-level texts
• Reads compound words and words with simple endings (-ing, -ed, -y, -es, -le, -er, -est)

Comprehension of Informational and Literary Text

• Describes characters (traits, roles, similarities) of a story heard or read
• Summarizes the main idea and key facts or details of informational text
• Makes reasonable statements and conclusions about a text, supporting them with evidence from the text
• Thinks critically about an author’s writing and supports opinions with examples from the text