Lesson Planning for Pride & Prejudice

Well, it's wonderful that my middle daughter (age 14) has decided to come back home! She desperately wanted to try public school and so I let her for 7th grade last year. I figured I didn't want to fight with her ALL. YEAR. LONG. And she did, in fact, have a good time there last year and was very happy.

This year for 8th grade, lo and behold (and as I suspected), the novelty wore off. Luckily, the state of Illinois allows you to homeschool for part of the day and go to public school for part of the day. So she will be able to continue to have her two excellent public school teachers for Science and Social Studies, and I will have her the rest of the time.

You've seriously NEVER seen a happier child.

She dove right into number bases (the first topic in Jamie York's 8th grade workbook) and gleefully learned octal, binary, and hexadecimal (this took her all of Monday and Tuesday). She started studying Latin again and she wants to learn Braille as well. She is taking Yoga, Script, and SWI with the wonderful parents who teach at my homeschool co-op. She's doing a creative writing program at the public library and a music writing program with Girls Rock. She requested Jane Austen and William Shakespeare for her literature study... and she asked me if she could please write more essays.

The first book she really wanted to read was Pride & Prejudice.

So, here I am lesson planning. I teach at the homeschool co-op full time using both Montessori and Waldorf approaches (Montessori choice time for part of the day and student one-on-one lessons individualized for mathematics, language arts, and geography; Waldorf age-appropriate main lesson blocks done whole group with main lesson books and the infusion of plenty of arts and handwork). I am already lesson planning every week for children from my youngest son (age 2 1/2 -- open-ended toys, sensory bins, puppet shows, songs, nature activities, recipes, and so on) up to teenagers.

And... now... Leah wants to read Pride & Prejudice!

• Jane Austen Close Reading Passages - FREE
  excerpt from Sense & Sensibility; this served as a nice introduction to Austen before beginning P&P
• Pride & Prejudice Complete Student Handbook
  activities for students to complete as they read, one sheet for each pair of chapters
• Pride & Prejudice: Date, Mate, Relate, or Hate - FREE
  fun characterization and textual evidence activity; this can be done several times during the book
• Pride & Prejudice Essay Project
  includes activities to do throughout the book which culminate in the final essay assignment -- she chose the social conventions brochure

This post contains affiliate links to the materials I actually use for homeschooling. I hope you find them helpful. Thank you for your support!