Five Online Classes for Kids at Home, and What to Check Before You Pay

How long should an online class be for your child's age?

The outdoor class is cancelled, the school has sent everyone home for the day, and there is an afternoon to fill with something better than a tablet game. Five formats survive the move to a screen without turning into a video the child merely watches: language conversation, music, drawing, coding and robotics, and storytelling. Each asks something different of the room, the device and the child, so read what a class listing says about delivery before the subject decides it for you.

Then start with the ceiling rather than the subject. IDAI's guidance for parents puts screen time at no more than two hours a day for a child over two. The health directorate at Kemenkes carries the WHO screen-time guidance for the younger ones: none is recommended below a year old or between one and two, and a three or four year old may have screen time but not more than an hour a day, with an adult present.

Read those as a daily total rather than a class length, because treating them as a class length is what turns a good class into a bad afternoon. If a four year old has an hour for the whole day and the class uses all of it, nothing is left for the video call to their grandmother. Half an hour is the sensible booking at that age.

Language conversation, one child and one teacher

Talking is the whole activity, so nothing is lost in the move to video. That makes conversation the safest format to book first.

The thing to settle before booking is whether it is one child or a group. In a group call your child speaks for a fraction of the lesson and listens for the rest, which is a different product at a different price. Ask how many children share the session and whether that number is capped.

Headphones do more for this format than a better camera. Consonants are what a child is learning to hear and produce, and a laptop speaker in a room with a fan running loses them.

Music lessons, where the camera angle matters more than the connection

A music teacher needs to see hands, an instrument and posture, and a video call by default shows a face. Turn the device sideways and put it where the teacher would stand, not where a parent would sit.

Two people cannot play in time over a video call. The delay is small and it is fatal to playing together, so a teacher who knows the format plays a phrase and then listens to it played back rather than trying to duet. If the trial lesson is spent attempting to play along, that teacher has not taught online before.

Ask what the child should have ready. A stand, a tuned instrument and a chair at the right height take a few minutes to sort out beforehand, and cost half the first lesson if they are not.

Drawing and painting, the format that survives a weak line

This is demonstration followed by quiet work, which is exactly the shape that tolerates a bad connection. If the picture freezes for a minute the child keeps drawing, and the lesson resumes where it left off.

Ask for the materials list before the first session rather than after it. A class built around watercolour paper and one particular brush is a different commitment from one that works with whatever is already in the drawer, and it is much easier to find that out in advance.

The camera does need to see the paper at some point in the lesson. A phone propped against a stack of books, pointing down at the table, is enough.

Coding and robotics, the class that needs a real keyboard

This is the format that most often fails for a reason that has nothing to do with teaching. A tablet cannot do it. The child needs a laptop or a desktop, a mouse, and an account on whatever platform the class uses, created and logged in before the session starts.

Ask which platform, and whether the account belongs to the child or to the centre. If it is the centre's, ask what happens to the work when the term ends, because a child who cannot open their own project again later has lost the thing they were proudest of.

Robotics classes divide into the ones that need a kit at your house and the ones that simulate the robot on screen. Both are real classes. Only one of them arrives with a delivery charge and a box of small parts.

Storytelling and public speaking, why does a group work better here?

The point of the format is an audience, and a private lesson removes it. A child telling a story to one adult on a screen is doing a reading exercise. The same child telling it to a handful of others who then respond is doing the thing the class exists for.

So the question to ask is not how small the group is, but how often each child presents. A session where two children perform and the rest watch is fine once. Booked as a term, it can mean your child speaks perhaps every third week.

This is also the format where a camera-shy child stalls hardest. Raise it with the teacher before the first session rather than discovering it in one.

Where should the screen sit, and how far from your child?

IDAI is specific about the room. Put the computer or device in the middle of the house, the living room or the dining room, and keep the child from taking it off alone into a bedroom. That holds for a booked class as much as for free browsing, and it is easier to enforce when the class happens at a set time.

Kemenkes gives the distances. Roughly forty to fifty centimetres between eyes and a phone, and fifty to sixty for a computer, which in practice means a table rather than a lap or a bed. A chair the child's feet can reach the floor from does more for posture than any amount of advice about sitting up straight.

For the eyes, Kemenkes recommends the twenty-twenty-twenty pattern: after every twenty minutes of screen, look at something about six metres away for twenty seconds. In a longer class that is a break the teacher should be building in, and it is a fair thing to ask about before booking.

What should you ask before you pay?

Ask for one session before a term. A trial tells you more about whether this teacher can hold your particular child over video than any description of the curriculum will, and a provider confident in the format will usually offer one.

Ask what happens to a missed session. Video makes a recording easy, so a class offering neither a recording nor a reschedule has made a choice, and it is better to learn that before the first time your child is ill.

Ask who is at the teacher's end, and whether a parent may sit in. For a young child, watching a few minutes of a lesson beats asking about it afterwards.

Ask what the child needs ready before the first session. Every format here has a set-up cost measured either in minutes or in a shopping trip, and the class where nobody mentioned it is the class that starts badly.

Which one should you start with?

Sort by what the child's hands are doing, not by what they say they like most. In language and storytelling the screen is the activity and the child looks at it continuously, so book those early in the day and keep them short. In music, drawing and coding the hands are busy and the screen is a window onto a teacher, so they sit more comfortably at the longer end of whatever your daily ceiling is.

If nothing is booked yet, the activities directory is where the listings sit, and the activity finder narrows things by age and interest if you would rather answer a few questions than scroll. Read each listing for how the class is actually delivered before you book, because the same subject is sold both ways.

That leaves the part that comes after choosing. The guide to booking kids activities in Indonesia covers what to check on a listing and what a first payment commits you to.