My Fall Curriculum, Part 2: Read, Listen, + Study

Fall is a bright highlight for me every year, but fall 2025 has been especially rich because of my personal curriculum. It hasn't taken much, either! By adding in a few bonuses here and there, I have enjoyed more fun and creativity than I would have otherwise. 

Today I'm going to talk about the second portion of my fall curriculum, which centers around the cozy books, music, and art study that I've enjoyed this season. I hope I can express how much these elements have added color to my life!

Part I: Poetry

Some of my dearest memories are of sitting across from my Great-Grandma at her kitchen table in Oroville, California. Sometimes we’d leaf through photo albums while she told me the names and stories behind each picture. Other times we played Rummy or Skip-Bo—though she could never remember the name and always called it “Gazebo” or some cousin-word. And some days I’d sit with a book of poetry, trying to recite while she coached me: “Put your shoulders back and speak clearly." or "Don’t feel like you need to go fast. Take your time.” As I read, she’d nod approvingly.

Thinking back now, I can't see how she could have enjoyed those little sessions. I was a little girl, stumbling through poems I barely understood. I must have sounded more like someone trying out a foreign language for the first time! She never let on. She just kept encouraging me, nodding to the rhythm of my reading.

Memories with my Great-Grandma live in the softest part of my memory and I suspect that’s one reason for the pull I've always felt toward poetry. I’m not an expert—I can’t always untangle symbolism or notice form—but I love it. So when I was designing a curriculum for myself, I knew poetry had to be part of it. I went to the shelf next to our stacks of Bibles and chose a collection that seemed like a good fit for fall reading. It turned out to be a very well-chosen volume for the season!

Robert Frost’s Poems was assigned to my kids in high school, but I never read it straight through myself. With its moody New England settings and that “everyman” spirit, it hit the bullseye for me.

It also reminded me of a Robert Frost connection from our traveling years. Frost is buried in the Old Bennington Cemetery in Vermont, which we visited in 2017. The cemetery sits on the grounds of the Old First Church—a congregation that has been meeting since 1762.

This church building was completed in 1805 and the congregation still meets there today. 

(If you're interested in seeing more photos of our time in Vermont, you can read the 2017 post I wrote here.)

Some favorite poems from the collection were “Home Burial,” which caught me off guard and made me properly weep, “Birches” and “For Once, Then, Something,” both of which held childhood descriptions that knocked me back into my own with the simplest images. Here's a bit from "Birches":

"Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and again
Until he took the stiffness out of them..."

In my mind, I know exactly who he's talking about and can see him clearly in my mind's eye. Such a nostalgic scene for me!

To carry me into winter, I’ve found a delightful poetry anthology I’m genuinely excited to sink into next month.

Part II: Shakespeare

I was assigned a couple of Shakespeare plays in high school—Romeo & Juliet and Julius Caesar. Sadly, I remember almost nothing, and at this point I can’t separate what I actually read of the former play, from Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film. Since I can’t unsee Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, I think it’s safe to say the movie left the bigger mark. (Side note: I revisited the soundtrack last year for the first time since the ’90s and it took me right back to the year I turned fifteen! I loved that album.)

After high school, I sometimes had a nagging thought I should give Shakespeare another try. I wanted to study him slowly, for comprehension and appreciation. I figured homeschooling would eventually provide the chance, but we were traveling fulltime when my kids reached high school and priorities shifted. Instead of trying to crack the code to Shakespeare's fabled genius, I was more focused on finding trails to hike and swimming in every lake we passed. So the kids read some Shakespeare in British Lit, but independently.

Now I've reached midlife, still mostly a Shakespeare novice. I finally decided it was time to make a little room for The Bard. My plan is one play per season, paired with The Play’s the Thing podcast. I started with Macbeth—a perfect fall choice—and genuinely enjoyed it but we can all agree that Lady Macbeth was off her ever-loving rocker, right? I listened to a recording of the play as I read and the actress playing her was completely brilliant, I guess, because she made me genuinely uncomfortable with her monologues. 

I digress. In addition to the audio of the play, the podcast helped bring the play to life for me. They slowed me down and offered the kind of insight I know I would have missed on my own.

I’ll link the first episode below for anyone interested.

Part III: Other Books

While it’s not everything I read this fall, this is the stack I set out to finish. As both a planner and a mood reader, I like to set aside a few seasonal books as the “spine” of my reading, then layer in library holds, book club picks, and recommendations that sneak in.

For me, reading seasonally is such an easy way to deepen the feeling of a time. It surrounds you with the sights, smells, and scenes of the season—without actually having to go see, smell, or do all the things yourself.

These books felt like fall to me for one reason or another:

This year, I finally found my groove with a new way of reading—one that fits my current season of life. I think the shift actually began about four years ago, when we stopped traveling full-time and settled in Idaho. At the time, I thought we were simply buying a house. But that one decision set off a ripple of small life changes I never saw coming. 

I didn’t know how much I’d love living in a four-season climate, or how my days would fall into a different rhythm because of it. I didn’t realize how dramatically life would change when the kids started college, got jobs, and built a friend group that I (appropriately) am not part of. When all of those transitions happened, my habits had to shift right along with them.

My “new way” of reading has a lot to do with when and how I read. After we planted a large garden, I found myself leaning more on audiobooks—from April to October especially—so I could spend long stretches outdoors and still get plenty of reading in. To my surprise, being willing to change how I read hugely improved both my reading and working lives. A happy little discovery.

Another shift has been when I read. For most of my life, I was a before-bed reader, but these days I fall asleep too fast (and you can only drop a hardcover on your face so many times before learning). Now that our homeschooling years are behind us, early-morning reading makes much more sense. By tacking poetry and Shakespeare onto my morning Bible study, I’ve created the coziest little learning block to wake up my mind each day.

It makes me laugh how perfectly these changes suit me in midlife, considering I once swore, “I can’t do audiobooks,” and “I can’t read in the morning.” Which—of course—are exactly the things I do now. Never say never.

Here's a printed list of the books in my fall curriculum:

Babel	The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Wuthering Heights	Carry on, Jeeves
The Body Keeps the Score	Never Let Me Go
Frankenstein	The Silent Patient
Gilead	The Man Who Died Twice
The Nightingale	The Thirteenth Tale
The Screwtape Letters	Verity
Crossing to Safety	The Divided Soul
The Overstory	North Woods

Though I've finished a good number of these already, I'm not sure if I'll get through them all in the next five weeks, which is just fine for me. Whatever I don't get to will start off my list next fall.

For fall music, I downloaded the Spotify playlist for Ambleside Online's chosen composers. This included selections from Ludwig van Beethoven, Antonio Vivaldi, and Frederic Chopin. 

This isn't the first time I've tapped in to the AO composer list, but is certainly the only time I've listened well enough to somewhat learn the music. I play the music during my quiet time in the mornings, in the car, and while I make dinner during evenings. I even listened to it while kayaking up and down the Snake River at the beginning of fall!

One thing that surprised me about listening with real frequency and intention was how quickly I began to tell the three composers apart. I haven’t memorized the pieces and I can’t name most of them, but somehow I can feel the distinction. I turned it into a little game where I try to guess the composer before checking to see if I am right. Beethoven and Vivaldi are the easiest for me to spot, while I really only identify Chopin as the one who isn’t Beethoven or Vivaldi!

Here is the playlist below. I hope someone else will listen and enjoy it as much as I did!

Art:

During our homeschooling years, I used Ambleside Online's posted schedule for art study and that's what I did again this fall. I found the free prints at A Humble Place, put them in a binder, and left it laying out for casual grazing. 

This season I focused on Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, and Eugène Delacroix, studying seven works by Dürer and six from the others.

If you've ever wanted to dabble in art study but don't want the cost or trouble of printing the artwork, you can visit Rebecca's Youtube channel, where she has posted a video for each piece of the semester's artwork.

Given that poetry, literature, and music all stir the emotions, it’s no surprise that this part of my fall curriculum held my dearest experiences. They’ve also opened up spaces where I genuinely feel myself growing—something I think many adults don’t often get the chance to experience in the rhythms of everyday life. I’m grateful for all of it.

The third and final portion of my fall curriculum will cover Watch, Improve, and Go!

Sarah