Ooohoo. Thumper and Astroboy finished their respective Sage books in March. Thumper finished Pink Series book 4 and Astroboy the Blue Series book 2. I racked my brain and made a second book for Astroboy. If you think about it, it’s actually quite amazing that you can write a whole book with just 20 characters (our first book) or 40 characters (the second book). For Thumper, she wrote her own book because she did not write a sentence for every 3 characters daily like she was supposed to. I actually like this way even better because she wrote so much it gave me a much better sense of her writing skill. I then edited the story for her with her help, typed it up, and she’s half way done with illustration. I would say the point of these books for her is more in practicing writing than reading because at this point learning new words is so easy for her, she gets her practice in just through repeat reading of the Sagebooks.
Thumper’s book 
Here’s the complete story. It’s printed as the back page of the booklet. I highlighted the new words that she doesn’t know so that I can add zhuyin to them inside the book. By my count, there are 256 characters total, 114 unique characters, with 10 new characters she doesn’t know. That’s about 4% of the total, within the limit set for good reading flow when you’re reading for fluency.
Here are some sample pages, one with the zhuyin in it.
Astroboy’s Book
Here’s his book. The writing seems stilted sometimes because unlike the other book, I used ONLY the characters he’d been introduced to. Apparently, at least according to the web app I found that counts characters, I managed to use 37 out of the 41 he’d been introduced to so far. Not too bad. 
He lost interest after 3 pages. He’d spent at least 20 minutes working on the second page, drawing all the windows and filling them in with lots of different family members. Totally NOT what the words say. That just goes to show you, kids have minds of their own. Same for the page with 2 birds. He wanted to draw in more than 2. I like these books a lot. I’m finding that reading books that are almost 100% filled with words Thumper knows is the best way to practice fluency. But it’s hard to find those books (and spend mucho money on them). Having leveled readers based on Sagebook Series, where it’s clear how many characters a child ought to know when they read this particular reader, is the way to go for me.
