How do I keep young ESL students engaged in a virtual lesson?

Engagement on video drops fast with young learners. Plan for it explicitly:

• Change activity every 4-7 minutes. A 30-minute lesson should have 4-6 distinct activities, not one block.
• Use Total Physical Response (TPR). "Stand up, jump three times, sit down." Gets the student out of the chair and binds language to movement.
• Run a visible reward system. Stars, stickers, points toward a goal the student can see on screen.
• Lead with visuals. Flashcards, slides, real objects you hold up to the camera. Avoid slides that are just text.
• Make every activity interactive. The student should be repeating, pointing, drawing, dragging, or doing something physical — not just watching you talk.
• Use tools that let them act on the screen, not just observe. Drawing, drag-and-drop, annotation, virtual stickers.
• Keep a "wild card" ready — a song, a silly face game, a quick movement break — for when you see the eyes glaze.

General-purpose video tools (Zoom, Google Meet) leave engagement entirely on you. Purpose-built classroom tools for young learners — Koala Go was built specifically around this problem — bake interaction into the platform itself: students can drag, draw, drop stickers, and act on the same canvas you're teaching from. Fewer "watch me talk" minutes, more "do something" minutes.

For students under 7, the limiting factor is rarely the lesson plan. It's screen fatigue. Shorter, more frequent lessons (3×20 min/week) often beat one long lesson.