About the book and the guide:

From the Publisher: A Suitcase Full is a picture book about the love of family, the power of one’s story, and the beauty of embracing change while leaving and finding home. When a young girl’s family is forced to flee Iran, there isn’t time to make a plan. Kimia can only take one suitcase, leaving behind many cherished possessions and people, including her beloved grandmother, Nana-joon. Traveling halfway around the world, Kimia learns to weave her past into her present, celebrating both her roots and her growth.

About the Guide

This guide braids literacy instruction and the Re-Imagining Migration framework into a single, coherent journey: readers build core comprehension skills — inference, retelling, using evidence, synthesis, and oral collaborative discussion — while moving through the Learning Arc from Moving Stories to Understanding Migration to Turning to Action. It honors our vision that literacy work and identity work are inseparable, inviting each reader to locate their own “suitcase” of language, memory, and belonging alongside Kimia’s. The result is a guide that builds skilled readers and a more empathetic, inclusive classroom community at the same time.