What Happens When You Use TV In A TK Classroom: A Teacher’s Honest Perspective
The rain started pouring at 7 a.m. last October, and by circle time, our annual field trip to the local pumpkin patch was officially cancelled. A collective groan went up around the rug, and Mia, who’d brought her favorite sparkly pumpkin rain boot to show off that morning, leaned her head on my knee and said she still wanted to see how pumpkins grew on the vine. I glanced up at the 42-inch TV mounted above my bookshelf, the one I’d avoided turning on for my first two years of teaching transitional kindergarten, and pulled up the 12-minute farm tour I’d saved the week before. That day changed how I think about screens in early childhood classrooms.
When I got hired five years ago, the district’s screen time guidelines said no more than 10 minutes of passive screen time a day, and every new teacher training I went to emphasized that any screen use was bad for little kids’ developing attention spans. Most parents checking the box on their first-day forms note that they limit screen time at home, so I assumed I’d never turn that TV on at all. It just collected dust behind my alphabet poster. Then last year’s parent-teacher conference with Leo’s dad changed that. Leo is non-verbal, uses an AAC tablet to communicate, and his dad told me he watches 10-minute videos of farm animals every morning before school, and it’s the only time he consistently tries new words on his device. He asked why we never did anything like that at school. I didn’t have a good answer.
I started small. The first week after that conference, I pulled up a 5-minute clip of cows grazing on a dairy farm for our farm unit. Halfway through, Leo tapped his AAC to say “moo” out loud for the whole class to hear. I was shocked. I’d been talking about cows for a week, and he’d never tried to name one before. That’s when I realized all the rules I’d internalized about no screens didn’t account for how different kids experience learning.
That doesn’t mean TV is always a good thing. Last semester, I messed up. We were doing our community helpers unit, and I found a 20-minute video about firefighters that I thought the kids would love. By minute 12, three kids were climbing on the reading nook couch, two were coloring at their tables, and Javi had snuck under the rug and fallen asleep. After class, a parent pulled me aside, quiet and polite, and said she’d been surprised when her kid told her they “watched a movie at school” that day. She limits her kid to 30 minutes of screen time a day total at home, and this threw off her whole evening. She wasn’t mad, just confused why we were using it, which was a totally fair question.
That mistake made me work out simple, concrete rules for when I turn on the TV now, that I’ve shared with other new TK teachers in my district. First, I never let it add up to more than 15 minutes total a day, and almost always split that into two shorter clips. No full cartoons, no movies on rainy days just to keep kids occupied. I tried that once with a substitute, and the whole class was wired and snappy for the rest of the afternoon, so that’s off the table now. Second, TV is never passive. I never turn it on while I do attendance or set up snack. Every clip we watch ties directly to something we’re doing that day, and we talk about it or do a connected activity right after. After the pumpkin patch video, we pulled out our block bin and built giant pumpkin trucks. After the hand-washing video we watch at the start of every year, we all practice washing our hands together singing the ABCs. Third, I only use it to show kids something we can’t see or do in our classroom. I don’t use it to teach skills we can do with real objects. We don’t watch a video about counting when we can count real blocks together. But when we have a hummingbird nest in the oak tree outside our playground that we can’t get close enough to see, a 6-minute slow motion video of the hummingbird feeding her babies gives the kids a view they’d never get otherwise. When one of my student’s mom was deployed to Germany last spring, we used the TV to do a group video call so the whole class could wave and sing her our good morning song, something that meant the world to that little boy that month.
I get why parents worry about TV at school. I’d worry too if I were a parent, if my kid came home talking about watching TV and I didn’t know what for. Most of the time, when parents ask me about it, I tell them what our rules are, and invite them to come sit in on a day to see how it works. For parents who have concerns, the concrete question to ask your kid’s teacher is how the TV is being used, not just whether it’s used at all. For teachers who are nervous to test it out, start with 5-minute clips tied directly to your current unit, pre-save them so you don’t end up scrolling through unrelated content when you need something.
This week, we’re starting our unit on pollinators, and I’ve got a 7-minute clip saved of bees moving in and out of a hive, close up enough to see the yellow pollen stuck to their legs. The real hive is at the edge of the school’s wood line, far enough away that we can’t get close enough to see anything but a blur if we’re lucky. After we watch the clip, we’re going to walk out to the clover patch by the playground and look for bees on our own, then make paper honeycombs out of construction paper when we get back. Last night, I got an email from Mia’s mom, asking for the link to the pumpkin video I showed back in October. Mia had asked to watch it again with her grandma when she came to visit, because she wanted to show her the giant 200-pound pumpkins she saw on the farm.
It’s not perfect. I still have days where I wonder if I’m doing the right thing turning it on. I know a lot of TK teachers who don’t use a TV at all, and that works great for them. It works for me because it fills little gaps we can’t cover with what we have in our four classroom walls. It doesn’t replace digging your own pumpkin out of the mud, but it’s a whole lot better than staring out the window at the rain and talking about it when you can’t go.
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