This is our first year as a homeschooling family that we don’t have any boys to educate. Our oldest is 19 and has moved on to his own pursuits in education, and as excited as I am for him, I think I’m even more excited for my girls. There’s a particular kind of joy in watching your first student head off into the world to figure out who he’s becoming, but there’s also something quietly thrilling about turning around and looking at the two who are still home with you, still curious, still willing to sit at the table and dig into a good book together. This year, my girls are finally getting the fully girly, feminine, pink-and-floral homeschool year I have dreamed of for them since they were tiny.

Enter: Jane Austen.

For this specific post, I’m going to focus on what we’re doing for my older girls. They’re 13 and 16 this year, right at that age where they can really sink their teeth into language, wit, and social commentary the way Austen intended. My 7 year old gets to be involved in bits and pieces of it too — she’s been begging to sit in on our read-alouds — but her curriculum plans deserve their own post another day, so I’ll save that for later.

If you’d like a full list of everything I ordered for this unit, feel free to check out my Amazon shopping list. I tried to put together something that felt cohesive from the books all the way down to the little extras, so hopefully it gives you a good starting point if you want to build something similar for your own house.

Where We Start: The Books

Of course, we start with books. It’s Jane Austen, so naturally I wanted a full collection of her works sitting on the shelf, spines lined up, ready to be pulled down and referenced all year long. It’s become genuinely important to me to build real libraries for my kids — not just workbooks and consumables that get tossed at the end of a school year, but actual books they can carry with them into adulthood, mark up, reread, and eventually pass down to their own kids someday. So each girl got her own beautiful collection of Austen’s complete works, something that feels like a gift as much as a curriculum purchase.

In addition to the Austen collection, poetry felt like a natural place to dig in alongside her. This William Wordsworth collection flows right into the feel of our Austen year — that same era, that same reverence for nature, restraint, and quiet feeling running underneath the words. We’ll be doing memorization, copy work, nature study, and just a general sense of joy and whimsy woven through his poems all year long. I love pairing poetry with a literature-heavy year like this one; it slows everything down and gives the girls a chance to notice language in a different way than they do when they’re moving through a novel.

Classics Paired With Modern Retellings

This year, my girls will be reading through three of Austen’s most beloved novels: Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. But we’re not stopping there. After each classic, they’ll read a modern retelling of that same story, so they can watch how the bones of Austen’s plots and characters get reimagined for a contemporary audience.

The Sense and Sensibility retelling we chose is titled Unromantic. The modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice is called Tolerable. And for Emma, we picked up Not Precisely Mr. Knightley. I loved hunting these down — there’s something delightful about handing your teenager a book that takes the same core story she just finished and drops it into a completely different world, then asking her to notice what changed and what stayed exactly the same.

After each pairing, the girls will compare and contrast the classic and the modern retelling through a series of essays. This is the piece of the plan I’m most excited about, honestly. It’s one thing to read a book and enjoy it; it’s another thing entirely to sit with two versions of the same story and articulate, in your own words, what each author was trying to say about love, class, family, and growing up. I’m hopeful this exercise will really help my girls appreciate both forms — the sharp, restrained wit of Austen’s original prose, and the more modern, casual voice of the retellings — and understand that great storytelling isn’t locked into one era or one style.

The Rest of the Subjects

Of course, an Austen-and-poetry unit doesn’t make up an entire school year on its own, so we’ve rounded things out with our other core subjects. For math, we’re continuing with Rod and Staff, in case you’re curious — it’s been a steady, reliable fit for our family for a while now, and I didn’t see a reason to change course just because the literature side of things is getting a glow-up.

For history, we’re reading through Salt, which I am absolutely enthralled by. I didn’t expect a book about a single commodity to be as gripping as it is, but it winds through so much of world history — trade routes, empires, revolutions — that it’s turned into one of those books I find myself reading ahead in on my own, just because I want to know what happens next.

And for science, we picked up Periodic Tales. You have to love a good Charlotte Mason-style science option that reads more like a collection of stories than a textbook. It fits so naturally into our whole approach this year: living books, real narratives, and subjects that invite curiosity instead of just memorization.

The Fun Extras

In addition to all the books, I wanted to add in a few fun things to make this year feel special, because part of what makes a themed homeschool year so memorable for kids is the little extras that make it feel like an event rather than just another stack of assignments.

Each girl got this shirt, and if you know, you know: what excellent boiled potatoes, indeed. It’s become a running joke in our house already, and I love that we have a little inside reference that ties back to the books we’re reading.

They also got a fun set of Pride and Prejudice stickers, pens, watercolor pencils, and stationery to practice letter writing. I want them writing real letters this year — to each other, to grandparents, maybe even in-character letters from Austen’s own heroines — and having pretty, themed supplies makes that feel like a treat instead of a chore.

These canvas bags were also a fun buy. Each of my girls got one, and they spent a good chunk of our first day back at school decorating and personalizing them — coloring, adding their names, making them their own. It was such a simple thing, but watching them sit together at the table, heads bent over their bags, chatting about which parts of the story they were most excited to read, was exactly the kind of moment I hope to look back on when I think about this season of homeschooling.

A Different Kind of Joy

This school year is going to be fun and whimsical, and I can already tell it’s going to be one I remember fondly. I loved every bit of teaching my son throughout his home education — there was a rhythm and a richness to those years that shaped so much of who he’s become. But there is genuinely something so different about getting to focus on the feminine parts of education for my daughters this year: the poetry, the letter writing, the pretty stationery, the shared laughter over an inside joke from a two-hundred-year-old novel. I’m looking forward to sharing more as the year unfolds, including what our 7 year old will be diving into alongside her big sisters. For now, I hope this gives you a peek into our world and maybe even a little inspiration for your own.