Is TV OK in Transitional Kindergarten? A TK Teacher Breaks Down How It’s Used
Last Tuesday, I was kneeling by the classroom door zipping 4-year-old Luka’s too-big rain jacket when Mia’s mom pulled me aside, voice low like she didn’t want Mia to hear. “Mia mentioned y’all watch TV during class this week,” she said, twisting the strap of her canvas diaper bag stuck with leftover unicorn stickers. “I limit screen time at home, so I just wanted to check in.”
I didn’t blame her for asking. Our classroom has a scuffed 10-year-old flat screen mounted above the bookshelf, with a tiny scratch in the corner from a stray foam block thrown last fall. If I was a parent dropping my kid off for the first time and saw that TV up there, I’d probably wonder the same thing. I told her what had happened earlier that week: We’d been studying backyard birds for our monthly theme, and three days in a row we’d trundled out to the ivy planter box by the playground fence to check on a sparrow nest we’d spotted. On Monday, we got there and the eggs had hatched. The first three kids in line gasped, but everyone behind was jumping up and down, screaming that they couldn’t see over each other’s shoulders. The nest was four feet up, tucked deep in the ivy, and I couldn’t let 18 wiggly four-year-olds crowd right up against it—mom sparrow would have abandoned the chicks for sure.
So I pulled out my phone, held it over the crowd, cast the live image to the TV, and suddenly everyone could see. Two fuzzy yellow chicks huddled together, mom sparrow flying in with a wiggly worm clamped in her beak. We stood there for 11 minutes, I checked the clock later, all of us quiet except for the occasional whispered exclamation. That was the “TV time” Mia had talked about.
I get why most parents assume TV in a TK classroom means a teacher putting on cartoons to zone out kids while she answers emails or eats a snack. And honestly? Sometimes that does happen. Last month, I woke up with a low-grade stomach bug, my instructional aide called out sick, and after 45 minutes of running after kids on the playground, I could barely stand. I herded everyone back in, put on a 20-minute silent video of forest animals grooming themselves, and sat on the rocking chair by the door sipping ginger ale for 15 minutes. No harm done, and I didn’t snap at anyone because I was exhausted. That’s just the reality of understaffed early education sometimes.
But 90% of the time, that’s not how we use it. Most days we don’t turn the TV on at all. When we do, it’s almost always less than 15 minutes, and it’s connected to something we’re already doing with our hands and bodies off screen. When our class hamster Mr. Nibbles had five babies back in October, everyone wanted to crowd around the cage to see, but the babies were too small and mom hamster gets defensive if we disturb her. So I set the cage on a chair next to my phone, propped a cheap magnifying lens over the camera, cast it to the TV, and everyone took a turn pointing out their favorite tiny baby. When we learned about community helpers, a student’s mom who works as an EMT recorded a video of herself showing us the inside of her ambulance and explaining what she does when people get hurt, and we played it for the class. During that week of nonstop rain back in January when we couldn’t go outside for recess at all, I put on a 10-minute video of kids dancing to nursery rhymes halfway through the day, and we all jumped around the rug together to burn off energy.
The biggest myth I run into is that all screen time for little kids is the same. When you plop your kid in front of TV while you make dinner at home, that’s usually passive, zoning-out time. But in TK, almost all the screen time we have is interactive. We’re talking through it, we’re answering questions, we’re connecting it to things we do after we turn the screen off. After we watched the sparrows, everyone drew their own chick pictures, we read three bird books, and we hung up two seed feeders outside our classroom window. The TV was just a tool to let everyone experience something we couldn’t all see at once, not a replacement for doing the real thing.
For parents who are worried about TV in their kid’s TK classroom, there are a few small, easy things you can do that don’t require a big confrontation with the teacher. First, just ask. Most teachers don’t mind talking through how they use it, and you’ll find out pretty quick if it’s an hour of cartoons every day or 10 minutes a couple times a week for a learning activity. Second, if you have a hard no on screen time for your kid, just tell the teacher. It’s not a hassle to have your kid do a quiet puzzle at the reading nook while the rest of the class watches. I’ve had two parents ask for that this year, and it’s never been a problem. Third, ask your kid a specific question instead of a vague one. Instead of “did you watch TV today?” try “what did you see on the big screen at school today?” If they ramble for five minutes about baby chicks or an EMT’s ambulance, you know it’s being used well. If all they can say is the name of a random cartoon you’ve never heard of, that’s when you can follow up.
After I talked through all this with Mia’s mom that afternoon, she nodded and said that made way more sense than what she’d pictured. Last Friday, Mia brought in a drawing she did at home of the two sparrow chicks, covered in sparkly glue, and asked if we could hang it by our classroom calendar. It’s still there. I get the hesitation: I have a 5-year-old of my own, and I limit his screen time at home to 30 minutes a day, same as a lot of parents. I’ve been in classrooms where the TV is on all day, and that’s not good, that’s for sure. But it’s also not the default. A mounted TV in a TK classroom is just a tool, same as our bin of blocks or our set of picture books. Sometimes it makes a learning moment possible that wouldn’t be otherwise. Sometimes it’s just what you need to get through a tough day when you’re short staffed and sick. It’s not good or bad on its own. It just matters how you use it.
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