School time and play time kind of blurred together some days and that was okay. But if I really wanted to read a certain book and discuss it with him I went by either please read chapter 2 before lunch or please read for a half hour before we go for a bike ride. Timers were my friend. Also if I had an agenda for the day and week we spent a few minutes Sunday going over the plans for the week including homeschool PE sessions (a group we went to) and he helped me plan out the week. With that he had some control over some stuff.
And I also explained to him that I wanted to cover second grade math in a year. We needed to be to this point by Christmas and this point by June. It was perfectly fine to go as slow as he wanted and have math game days and go off on exploring math however we wanted to but then it would mean we wouldn't "graduate" to third grade math and would need to work through the summer which was fine with me. But he also knew that I didn't assign every problem on a page. Sometimes we did them on the white board or sometimes in sidewalk chalk...
And this brings me to how to do it with a sibling. Take math out to the drive way. Do the lesson in sidewalk chalk. Sibling gets sidewalk chalk too. Everyone is happy.
A lot of the time if my younger son could have the same materials (for art projects or science labs or math manipulatives) he was just as content to pretend to school along side my older son to explore and listen.
During reading time the younger can have books to read and look at too and employing the older one to read to the younger one worked a lot. Other times the younger one did wander off and play...but he knew he had to play quietly and out of sight.
School was 2 hours to 3 hours tops for us each day and it wasn't always 3 hours straight.
