But I still found myself vacillating between more structured full curricula and individual programs that sounded more fun, but also threatened to leave holes in my children's education. But at least I now have a theory about how to do it and still preserve our sanity. What has worked for us in the end is following a two-year plan for each subject. So, for example, my second grader will alternate between the red book in Learning Language Arts through Literature and the Bob Jones third-grade writing and grammar worktext, but he'll finish neither this year. The secret is not trying to make it all the way from Creation to the fall of Communism in one breathless year.
Textbooks are thorough, but they're also repetitive.
But home schoolers don't need to worry about simultaneously challenging the advanced student and assisting the stragglers. In my experience, this means that skipping years often works just fine with textbooks, especially if we've taken the time to cover the subject thoroughly the first time around. But if your child needs some extra time with a subject, you shouldn't hesitate to work back a grade or two. Although textbooks all look the same on that display table at the convention, you'll discover that even in the same subject from the same publisher, some year's books are better than others. For example, I think the Bob Jones Reading 6 and accompanying worktext are a terrific introduction to literary devices.