Three Summers

by Amra Sabic-El-Rayess, Laura L. Sullivan

In this coming-of-age memoir, Amra Sabić-El-Rayess recalls three formative summers in Bosnia before the Bosnian War, exploring friendship, family, first crushes, and the desire to belong. As Amra navigates ordinary growing-up experiences, readers also encounter the prejudice and divisions that threaten her community. Although the supplied category identifies the book as fiction, it is a memoir, a distinction worth discussing with students.

Big Idea

Friendship and solidarity can challenge exclusion, even as prejudice places pressure on everyday relationships. Writers make these experiences meaningful by choosing which moments to dramatize, summarize, or pause over.

Discussion Questions

1.When does Amra feel that she belongs, and when does that feeling become uncertain? What details help you understand the difference?
2.How do Amra’s friendships influence the way she sees herself? Identify a moment when another person’s response matters especially deeply to her.
3.Where do larger social divisions enter an otherwise ordinary childhood experience? How do the authors help readers notice their impact?
4.Choose an interaction involving friendship, embarrassment, or a crush. Why might the authors show that interaction as a scene rather than simply tell us what happened?
5.How does knowing that these summers precede the Bosnian War affect your reading? What can readers understand from the historical context that young Amra may not yet understand?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 45–50 minutes📦 Copies of the book or a teacher-selected excerpt, paper, pencils, colored pencils, sticky notes, and a board or chart paper. Optional: a map of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslavia.

Learning Goals

Use specific textual evidence to explain how friendship and exclusion shape Amra’s experiences.
Distinguish between scene, summary, and reflective pause in a memoir.
Explain how dialogue, sentence length, and selected details influence a reader’s experience of time.
Revise a short passage to change its pacing while preserving its central event and meaning.
Distinguish the author’s remembered experience from a student’s creative adaptation.

Activity Steps

1.Introduce the book as memoir and briefly locate Bosnia within the former Yugoslavia. Establish discussion norms: critique prejudice, avoid generalizing about ethnic or religious groups, and do not require students to disclose personal experiences of discrimination.
2.Read an age-appropriate passage about Amra’s friendships, family life, or desire to belong. Identify what happens, what Amra wants, and which words or actions reveal the emotional stakes.
3.Have pairs divide the episode into three moments: before the important interaction, the interaction itself, and its immediate aftermath. Draw one panel for each and add a brief paraphrase supported by a page reference.
4.Ask students to label each panel with a pacing choice: move quickly, develop a scene, or pause for thought. Discuss which moment deserves the most space and why.
5.Students summarize the episode in two sentences, then expand one moment into six to eight sentences using actions, selected details, and thought. Any invented dialogue must be labeled as imagined adaptation, not quotation.
6.Partners read both versions aloud and explain how the pacing changes the emphasis. Finish with an exit sentence: 'I slowed down at ___ because it helps the reader understand ___.'

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS RI.3.3–RI.5.3 — Explain relationships among individuals, events, ideas, and concepts in an informational text, including literary nonfiction.
ELA: CCSS RI.6.3–RI.7.3 — Analyze how individuals, events, and ideas are introduced, developed, and connected.
Writing: CCSS W.3.3–W.7.3 — Develop narratives through sequencing, description, dialogue, and, in later grades, deliberate pacing.
Speaking and Listening: CCSS SL.3.1–SL.7.1 — Participate in collaborative discussions, building on others’ ideas and referring to the text.
SEL: Social awareness and relationship skills — Examine belonging, perspective-taking, and responses to exclusion. Select the grade-specific standards appropriate to the class.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

In this Pace-Write-Read study, students examine how the authors turn remembered summers into a shaped reading experience. Three Summers connects familiar concerns—friendship, family expectations, attraction, and acceptance—with the growing significance of prejudice in Amra’s world. Its memoir form invites an important craft question: how does a writer decide which parts of a lived experience deserve a full scene and which can be carried through summary? Pacing is not simply a matter of making prose fast. A short exchange may deserve careful attention because it changes Amra’s sense of belonging, while a longer interval may move past in a few sentences. Students can trace how action, dialogue, description, and reflection distribute attention. They should also distinguish young Amra’s understanding within an event from any retrospective perspective offered by the narrator, using evidence rather than assuming every passage contains both. Use the cycle pace, write, read: notice how a selected passage directs attention, try a comparable pacing decision in a short adaptation, and read the result aloud to test its effect. For younger students, use a brief, teacher-screened excerpt and concrete questions about friendship; for older students, add historical context and analysis of narrative distance. Keep historical suffering distinct from ordinary classroom disagreements, and never simulate persecution or require personal disclosures.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Choose an episode in which Amra’s feelings about belonging change. Compare the amount of reading space given to the event itself with the space given to its setup and aftermath.
2. Plot	Trace an episode through Amra’s desire, an obstacle, her response, and the outcome. Discuss how a memoir can shape real experiences into a narrative without claiming that the events were invented.
3. Prosody	Read a passage about friendship or social uncertainty aloud twice, changing pauses, emphasis, and speed. Ask which reading best fits the language and Amra’s emotional situation.
4. Word	Select a word that conveys acceptance, embarrassment, affection, or exclusion. Test a near-synonym and explain how the substitution changes the emotional pressure of the passage.
5. Concept	Use belonging as a connecting concept across two summer episodes. Ask how concrete actions make this abstract idea visible without reducing Amra’s experiences to a simple moral.
6. Voice & Worldview	Notice what Amra finds exciting, unfair, frightening, or important. Discuss how these judgments create a recognizable voice and reveal her developing understanding of other people.
7. Point of View	Examine how the first-person memoir keeps readers close to Amra’s experience. Identify what she can observe about another person and what she can only infer.
8. Setting & Place	Locate Bosnia geographically, then examine a specific place in the selected episode. Explain how that setting shapes who can meet, what they can do, and whether Amra feels comfortable.
9. Original Characters	Because this is memoir, discuss characterization of real people rather than invention of fictional characters. Track how an action or exchange distinguishes one friend or family member from another.
10. Dialogue	Select an exchange involving Amra and a friend or family member. Notice how the turns of speech reveal closeness, disagreement, or uncertainty while controlling how quickly the interaction unfolds.
11. Details	Find a small detail that matters to Amra in a friendship or crush-related episode. Ask why that detail receives attention and what would be lost if it were removed.
12. Descriptions	Compare a descriptive passage with nearby action. Does the description establish everyday life, reveal Amra’s attention, or delay an interaction readers are waiting to witness?
13. Firsts	Look for an experience Amra presents as new or newly significant, such as an unfamiliar feeling about friendship or attraction. Examine how the narration signals its importance without assuming every milestone is explicitly called a first.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Identify a moment when readers seem especially close to Amra’s immediate experience. Point to the action, thought, or specific observation that creates this effect.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Color-code a short selection for scene, summary, and reflection. Discuss how the three-summer framework accommodates both individual encounters and changes that develop over time.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Distinguish Amra’s immediate uncertainties about relationships from the reader’s historically informed concern about Bosnia’s future. Explain how these different kinds of uncertainty can coexist.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Check a selected chapter for an actual shift in time or an unresolved ending; label only devices present in the text. Distinguish an explicit flash-forward from a reader’s outside knowledge of the coming war.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Study a chapter ending and the next chapter’s opening in the classroom edition. Does the break suspend a question, mark elapsed time, or invite reflection on a relationship?
19. Pace & Creativity	Retell one documented interaction first as a concise summary and then as an expanded adaptation. Compare which approach highlights the event’s emotional stakes more effectively.
20. Play	When the text offers a lighthearted interaction among young people, notice how it establishes their relationships. Discuss why ordinary enjoyment matters in a memoir read with knowledge of later historical violence.
21. Performance	Read a friendship exchange in pairs, attending to pauses and changes in tone. Avoid performing discriminatory language; paraphrase harmful speech when necessary and analyze its effects instead.
22. Personality	Collect evidence of how Amra responds to social pressure, affection, or disappointment. Discuss how patterns of response reveal personality more fully than a single descriptive label.
23. Humor	If a selected passage contains awkwardness or humor, identify whose perspective makes it funny. Explain how humor can build affection or offer relief without making prejudice itself the joke.
24. Pause	Find a moment when action gives way to thought or observation. Ask what readers understand during this pause that they might miss in a faster retelling.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Look for a supported example of imagery, comparison, or sound pattern in a passage about Amra’s surroundings or feelings. If none stands out, practice creating a clearly labeled comparison rather than attributing one to the authors.
26. Repetition	Track a recurring concern, such as acceptance or friendship, across the summers. Distinguish repetition of an idea from literal repetition of words and explain how its meaning develops.
27. Rhythm	Compare the sentence patterns in an interaction with those in a reflective passage. Read both aloud to investigate how phrasing shapes urgency, hesitation, or thoughtfulness.
28. Punctuation	Choose a brief passage and mark how its actual punctuation guides the reader’s breath. Discuss how sentence boundaries and dialogue punctuation influence the pace of Amra’s experience.
29. Questions	Identify an explicit question or an uncertainty implied by Amra’s behavior. Track when readers receive an answer and whether that answer changes the emotional direction of the episode.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare Amra’s responses to similar social situations in two different summers. Use textual evidence to determine what changes in her confidence, understanding, or relationships.
31. Objects	Choose an object actually mentioned in the selected scene and examine how Amra notices or uses it. Consider whether it is practical, emotionally significant, or both; do not assume every object is symbolic.
32. Threes	Use the title’s three summers to examine large-scale organization. Create three columns showing a meaningful experience from each summer and explain the pattern without forcing the summers into identical arcs.
33. Lists	If the selected passage includes a list, test how its accumulation affects pace. Otherwise, build a student-created list of Amra’s concerns and compare its compressed effect with a developed scene.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Inspect paragraphing and any section breaks in the edition being used. Ask how these spaces separate speech, emphasize a realization, or signal a transition without treating accidental page layout as authorial intent.
35. Art & Graphics	Examine the edition’s cover and any available visual paratext for expectations about summers, friendship, and growing up. Keep those design choices distinct from the narrative; if no interior graphics are present, create an evidence-based relationship map.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Make a teacher-created sorting task using brief paraphrases from a selected chapter: scene, summary, or reflection. Have students defend their classifications rather than turn experiences of exclusion into competitive role-play.
37. Placement	Study where information about a relationship or social division appears within an episode. Ask how readers’ understanding would change if that information arrived before the interaction rather than afterward.
38. Form	Discuss how memoir combines remembered events with deliberate selection and organization. Ask what the three-summer form foregrounds about growing up that a full life chronology might not.
39. Dummy	Adapt the bookmaking idea of a dummy into a six-panel planning booklet for one episode. Give an emotionally important moment more panels and compress transitions, labeling the booklet as a student adaptation.
40. Passion	Ask what the memoir’s attention to friendship, dignity, and belonging suggests the authors want readers to notice. Students should support their interpretation with a narrative choice rather than claim certainty about the authors’ private intentions.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-It! task — One Moment of Belonging Minutes 0–4: Read a short, teacher-selected passage in which an interaction affects Amra’s sense of acceptance. Establish the participants, what actually happens, and what the text reveals about her feelings. Minutes 4–7: Students write a two-sentence factual summary. Underline the moment that carries the greatest emotional weight and attach a page reference. Minutes 7–13: Expand that moment into six to eight sentences. Retain the documented event, but slow the reading through a sequence of small actions, an observed detail, and attention to Amra’s response. Students may use original paraphrase or clearly label invented thoughts and dialogue as creative adaptation; these must not be presented as memoir quotations. Minutes 13–17: Partners read their summary and expanded version aloud. Listeners identify where the pace changes and explain whether the added attention clarifies friendship, uncertainty, or exclusion. Minutes 17–20: Revise one sentence or paragraph break to make the pacing more purposeful. Submit both versions with the reflection: 'I gave more space to ___ because ___.' For grades 3–4, use oral rehearsal and a four-sentence expansion; for grades 5–7, require a brief explanation connecting the revision to the authors’ choices in the source passage.

Classroom Activities

Three Moments, Three Speeds

Students create a three-panel pacing map of a selected episode from Amra’s summers, then rewrite one small moment at two different speeds. By comparing a brief summary with an expanded scene, they investigate how pacing can emphasize belonging, uncertainty, and the emotional importance of friendship. Students work from the book rather than inventing events and clearly label any imagined wording as an adaptation.

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