Four Jewels in My Crown by Marann Jones is the accounting of one mother’s journey to home educate her children. The book begins with Marann sharing what led to their decision to pull their school-aged children out of school and begin the journey to home educate their children. She also shares her preference for the term “home educate” over “home school,” stating, “... the one assumes every aspect of life as significant in the teaching process, and the other, as I understand it, focuses more on the substitution of state or private educational lesson plans at home.”

From there, she shared how her week was set up. There is one chapter dedicated to each day of the week and one for extracurriculars.

She and her husband chose to use the Bible as the core of their curriculum and her husband created a curriculum outline that was a spiral for all the subjects one would expect to learn, placing God at the center.  With that in mind, they outlined their week.

Mondays would be for teaching English literacy. Tuesdays focused on foreign language. Wednesdays were for mathematics. Thursdays covered history and on Fridays, they studied science.

For each day, Marann went into detail with the types of learning she included and how she incorporated each subject in relation to the Bible. She also shared some “aha” moments, times when she wanted to give up and instances where she noticed the Lord’s blessing in their effort to home educate.

Four Jewels in My Crown is a quick and easy read. It is not a “how-to” book or a guide to curriculum. It really is just one mom reflecting on her years of home educating her children. I found this book to be a sweet recollection of Marann’s home education journey. I could see its value for another mom at the beginning of her home education journey. This book could serve as the equivalent of a conversation answering the question, “what did you do?” or “how did you do it?”  Both important questions new homeschool moms often have.

As an experienced homeschool mom, I appreciated the insight into another mom’s homeschool world.

If you enjoy memoirs andwant a look into the life of another homeschooling mama, then you would enjoy this book.

--Product Review by Destiny Mawson, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, February 2020