First Grade Reading: We love Henry and Mudge

It's been a while since I've written about our first grade reader.  I'm excited that he has finally progressed to the point that we are now able to check out library books as his guided reading material.  I will still supplement with some printed books from Reading A-Z, but I think he is very happy to finally be reading primarily out of "real" books.  My older son was extraordinary in that he could pretty much read anything from about age 4 on.  So he didn't really go through the "beginning reading" stage.  One series of beginner books that he always enjoyed, however, was the "Mr. Putter and Tabby" series by Cynthia Rylant.  We own many copies of those books.  I thought they were a BIT advanced for my first grader right now.  He will probably be ready for them in a few months.  I was excited to discover another great beginner series also by Cynthia Rylant, the "Henry and Mudge" books.  Even better was my discovery of a whole bunch of "Henry and Mudge" printables from Homeschoolshare!  Homeschoolshare doesn't have printables for EVERY book in the series (there are 28 books!), but they do have printables for many of them. 

My son would really like to read all the books in this series so I printed out the list shown below from Homeschoolshare.  He can mark off each book as he reads it.  We have been trying to find the first book, but neither of the libraries we visit has that one!!

Below you can see the printables we did for Henry and Mudge in the Sparkle Days.  There was one printable for each chapter of the book.  Filling out a quick summary on the printable after reading the chapter was great writing practice for my first grader.

To help him with organizing his writing, I just used a black marker to draw some "writing" lines inside each printed shape.  This little modification helps so much to keep his words in line.