My three day literacy unit would be in a first grade classroom. To promote fluency, it would revolve around the book Green Eggs & Ham by Dr. Seuss. Green Eggs & Ham is a good choice for beginning readers because it is relatively short, at approximately 800 words in length, and it is highly repetitive. Many of the same phrases repeat several times, in whole and in part. Though it is 800 words long, it only uses 50 vocabulary words in total, most of which are only one syllable words. Many of those words are also high-frequency words that are not easily decodable either, so students need that practice to recognize them just by sight. These high frequency words include could, would, you, here, there, house, and many others. It also gives children extra experience with developing phonemic awareness, provided by the use of constant rhymes throughout Green Eggs & Ham. It is filled with many rhymes like “goat and boat,” “train and rain,” “mouse and house,” “fox and box,” among others. Building familiarity with these high frequency words and familiarity with these similar sounding words helps build automaticity. Furthermore, Green Eggs & Ham is a great choice for building fluency because reading it correctly involves more than reading at a smooth rate or with proper phrasing. The book is made entirely of dialogue, and the dialogue is often emotional, with appropriate punctuation used to mark the emotion. One character is always asking in an inquisitive or insistent manner, and the responding character is constantly frustrated, emotional, or angry in response, until the ending segment where he responds with happiness and surprise. To read Green Eggs & Ham with fluency, a student would have to master the proper intonations by accurately expressing the emotions of the character. It requires being able to understand what the characters are going through and reflecting that in their voices as they read the story aloud. 	
	During the first day, we would focus on choral reading. This would begin by my having gone through the entire story once, modeling it for them with the proper phrasing and intonation. Students would be in pairs and each pair would have their own copy of the book to read along with. After I have modeled the story with them, we will have a discussion about the emotions of the characters and what happened in the story, and then read it through at least twice together in a choral reading exercise. They will be guided on reading it smoothly and with the proper emotions. The last time we read it through, I will time how long it takes to get through with a stopwatch, to estimate the collective reading rate. The goal is a minimum of 80 words per minute, and I will watch students closely to see if they are reading along with the proper phrasing and intonation. On the second day, the students will be divided into partners, and each group will read the story a minimum of three times together. The first time they will read the book simultaneously with one another, the second time they will each read one character’s part, and the third time they will reverse characters and read it again. I will circulate and spend time with each partner, observing their progress closely and helping them as required. Each group will have a cheap stopwatch or clock that they can use to record their times, with the goal being a minimum of 90 words per minute by the time of the last read through. This day’s activity will be practice for the third day’s activity, which will be reader’s theater, with scripts being created for ease of dialogue. The partnerships will be combined into groups of four for time reasons, with two partners reading up until the approximate halfway mark of the story, with one playing Sam and the other Sam’s friend, and then the other two partners taking over for the second half of the story. Each group of four will perform the reader’s theater for the rest of the class, with a goal of reading the story at a minimum of 100 words per minute, with good intonation and smooth phrasing. 

