Oshkosh Early Learning Newsletter

Oshkosh Early Learning News - November 2025

I hope your holiday season is filled with opportunities to enjoy your little one with some one-on-one time, enjoying a few special moments talking and playing together. Please remember that the best present you can give your child is your presence. The holiday season can be filled with big changes in routines for children and extra stress for parents. A few tips for setting your child up for success include:

• Prepare your child ahead of time for changes in routines and schedules. Too much time and children may forget or become anxious, but not enough warning and children are caught off-guard, which can often increase behavior. You know your child best regarding how much lead time they will need. A little advanced notice on your part could prevent meltdowns, hurt/scared feelings, and lead to an overall more peaceful and enjoyable holiday experience for everyone.

• Review expectations before you go somewhere new. Make sure you talk with your child about how you expect them to behave when they go visit a friend or relative’s house, go out for dinner, etc. Telling children what you want them to do vs. not do helps children. Children think in pictures and if you say, "don’t run", all they tend to picture in their head is running. Help them focus on what they should do such as: “At Grandma’s it will be important that we ask before touching things that do not belong to us and use inside voices.” Providing praise for meeting those expectations can go a long way as well! This could sound like “You asked Grandma to look at the sparkly bells on her table before you grabbed them to go play. That was respectful!”

• Think from a child’s perspective and plan accordingly. Many holiday gatherings are not designed with your child in mind. When and what will your child eat? Is the eating and sleeping schedule significantly different than what your child is used to? What is available for your child to do that will be fun for them and be appropriate for the environment you are going to? Who will be there and does your child know them?

Sincerely,

Beth Schendel

Principal of Early Learning

We hope you will also take a moment to complete this brief Family Input Survey so we can set the year up to best meet your family’s needs.

• November 26-28 - No School for Students - Thanksgiving Break
• December 19 - No School for 4K and Early Childhood (Professional Development for Staff)
• December 22-31 - No School - Winter Break!
• January 1 - No School
• January 13 - 4k Family Night 5:00-7:00PM

Here are 3 ways!

• Call the Office of Early Learning at 920-424-1004, if we are unavailable leave a detailed message with your child's name, teacher and reason for absence.

• Submit an Absence Request through your parent portal.
  In IC go under More > Absence Request (Direction found here)

• Send an email to both Teresa and Amanda at teresa.doemel@oshkosh.k12.wi.us, amanda.brayton@oshkosh.k12.wi.us

We held our first of two Family events focused on supporting social and emotional regulation on Thursday, November 20th. It was so fun to see so many families and children attend the event.

Families learned about:

• Powerful regulation skills and strategies for adults and children

• Conscious Discipline’s Brain State Model and how your state can impact behavior

• How we’re working on these skills in school and how practice could be extended at home

All families went home with:

• A new breathing tool

• A book

• Ideas :)

We hope you’ll consider coming to our follow-up event focused on staying out of power struggles when setting clear limits and expectations with preschoolers.

Date: 1/13 5:00 - 7:00 pm

Bring the whole family! Meal and childcare provided. :)

Check out some of the fun we had.

We have several staff who are in and out of our 4K classrooms on a regular basis to provide support for teachers and students. We wanted to introduce our support staff to you so that you can put a face with a name. We’re always excited to see our Oshkosh Early Learning friends, whether it’s at school or out in the community. Here’s who may be a familiar face to your child:

One of our school goals is to have children identify or produce 4-9 letter sounds by the end of the 4K school year. They should also be able to recognize and name at least 11 letters. Here are some fun ways to support learning letters and sounds daily!

Alphabet hunt--Look for letters everywhere!

• around the house (you can hide letters and have your child find them)

• on signs while driving in the car

• at the store

• in the restaurant

I Spy something that starts with the letter sound /P?/!

Have your child name all the things they see that start with that sound…

(pizza, people, purse, pencil)

Read ABC books and make a personalized ABC book

Get creative and make your own alphabet books!

• You can use photo sites to create an alphabet photo book

• Have your child cut out pictures from a magazine and glue onto pages or draw pictures for each letter

• Use objects to form the letter

This month’s focus is on grip. Having the write grip requires children to build strength in their hand muscles and supports their success in letter formation as they learn how to write.

Check out what your child has been learning in math this month -- it’s more than just playing with plastic shapes! Your child has been building strong foundational math skills they will come back to learning more about as mathematicians as they grow. This month we focused on the math concept of more/less and comparing sets of objects, as well as naming and understanding attributes of different shapes, and beginning to explore and understand basic patterns.

December introduces the math concept of subitizing - visually identifying how many objects in a set without having to count each item. Students will also be learning to compare and sort objects based on attributes as well as going deeper with other early math skills listed below.

“Our choice of where we put our attention teaches children what we value. If we focus on what children have done wrong, we will teach them to value judgment and problems. If we focus on what we want to have happen, we will teach respectfulness and solution-seeking” (Creating the School Family, Dr. Becky Bailey, p.251).

• Using this powerful idea that “what you focus on you get more of” we are hoping that this holiday season Elf on the Shelf can be a powerful tool for behavior change in your home. There is an abundance of research that supports developing our power of attention to focus on behaviors we want to see from our children instead of those we don’t. At any given time, in classrooms and homes all over the world, there are children being helpful and some being hurtful. Which ones will get your elf’s attention? Where do you want to put your elf’s focus?

  • Allow your elf to be the vehicle that retrains your eyes to see the love and positivity that surrounds you. You can help the children in your care grow up seeing the glass as half full instead of half empty. We can also teach our children that when there is an oops, it is an opportunity to learn, focus on a solution, and find the beauty in the situation.

  
  

  Here are a few ideas to shift your elf’s attention to the positive:

  
  

• Create some family agreements. What do you value as a family? In our home we created some agreements as a team (including our children) and have the following family agreements: Be safe, be kind and stay calm, be helpful, be trustworthy. We talked about what it did and didn’t look like. We signed our agreements as a sign of commitment from each family member.

• 3-5 positively stated agreements that apply to everyone in the family at home, at school, at work, in the car, at grandma and grandpa’s will help you be successful!

• Write your agreements down on a piece of paper or poster(adding pictures can be powerful for young children as they cannot yet read - take a picture of your child following the agreements and put that up as an easy and powerful example)!

• Tell your children that your elf will be watching for the best in them. When your elf (or anyone else in the family) notices someone following the family agreements they will write that person’s name down and stick it up to the poster you made. Your children are typically amazing observers. They want to be noticed for doing these things and are usually quick to point out others following the agreements as well. Encourage them to add people’s names as well!! What a powerful visual reminder of all of the positive things happening in your family and home.

• Have the Elf leave little notes that contain encouraging words and notices helpfulness: “You _____ (describe what the child did) so (describe how it contributed to others). That was helpful!

Examples:

• You cleaned up the race cars so no one would fall. That was helpful!

• You reminded your Mom to put on her seatbelt so she would be safe. That was helpful!

• You raised your hand quietly so others can learn. That was helpful!

Here are some examples of our elf visiting and writing positive notes for our family after just one day we already had a few stickers up. Our kids had put them up as well! We can’t wait to see how this might look in your family too. :)