Oshkosh Early Learning Newsletter

Oshkosh Early Learning News - October 2025

The 2025-2026 school year is off to a fun start! Your students are working hard in their classrooms to learn new skills, navigate new social situations, and have fun along the way!

Have they talked to you about their school job?

Your child is a helpful part of their classroom each day through their school family job.

Have they talked to you about their Safe Keepers and keeping it safe?

Each day, we make a commitment to help our Safe Keepers (the teachers and other special adults in the building) keep the classroom safe enough for everyone to learn and play.

We are just coming up on our first checkpoint to measure all of the learning and growth your child has made so far in the areas of social-emotional, language, and cognitive learning domains. We are also checking on a few of the early literacy and mathematics skills we will continue to build on throughout the year. This checkpoint is just a dipstick of what your child knows and is able to do. Our first formal assessment period with Progress Notes/Report Cards goes home in February. We hold conferences for all students following this more robust assessment checkpoint in February. In mid-late November/early December, our teachers may be reaching out to you to collaborate around supporting your child’s growth, keeping it safe in the classroom, or a successful transition to/from school each day. All other conferences are by family request, as we meet with all families in February.

Ahead of the Thanksgiving Break, your child will be sent home with an At-Home Learning Kit. Our goal is to provide opportunities for families to continue supporting their child’s learning, as we know you are your child’s first teachers. This kit is designed to be playful and fun. We hope you’ll take some time to engage with your child’s learning over the Thanksgiving and Winter Break or throughout the cold winter months as you’re looking for fun activities to do!

Sincerely,

Beth Schendel

Principal of Early Learning

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

• November 7 - No School for Students ( Professional Development for Staff)
• November 20 - OEL Family Night - 5:00PM - 7:00PM at Carl Traeger Elementary School
• November 26-28 - No School for Students - Thanksgiving Break
• December 19 - No School for 4K and Early Childhood (Professional Development for Staff)

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

All 4K families were invited to a “Play to Learn Night” sometime between October and early November. This event places your student as your tour guide while you learn about all the fabulous social, emotional, and academic skills they are building through play in our classrooms!

The purpose of this event is to allow children to share their classroom with their families and take you on a tour of all the learning they do each day through their discovery-based learning and play. As you explore the classroom with your child, take note of all of the learning that happens in the various centers around the room. Take a mental picture of the pride on your child’s face as they show you around their school and all of the big, important things they do each day! Priceless!

Each family will also receive a copy of Lovely Day. We hope you enjoy reading it together as a family over and over again. The Literacy Corner section of our newsletter includes ideas of how you could enjoy the book together with your child.

Join us for a night built for the whole family!

When: Thursday, November 20th from 5:00 - 7:00 PM

Where: Carl Traeger Elementary

**Childcare and meal provided**

Bring the whole family for a night of food, fun, and learning! Let us do the meal planning for you, as we provide dinner for the whole family prior to separate learning experiences for both children and adult caregivers. Siblings are welcome to attend! After a quick meal, children will head off to learn and play about self-regulation (including any older or younger siblings) in classrooms, while the adult caregivers can take some time to settle in and learn more about how to support self-regulation for themselves and their preschoolers.

Please RSVP by November 18th

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:

This book is for you and your family to keep at home and enjoy together over and over again!

Books with repetitive and rhythmic phrases allow kids to join in on the reading and practice language skills. The rhyming words will also help children notice and develop an awareness for rhyme.

Here are some ways to enjoy this book together:

Before we read, let’s look at…

The Cover: What is the title of this book? Read the names of the author and illustrator and talk about how they wrote the words and made the pictures. The author of this book is a songwriter who wrote the words in a song and now it’s a book!

While we read…

Monitoring Comprehension: As we read, it is important to think about characters and their feelings. How do the kids feel when their day is not going the way they hoped? How do you know? How do they solve problems and change their upset into a lovely day or happy moment?

Language and Print Development: repeating the words together “Lovely Day” and noticing the print all over the page that says “Lovely Day”

After reading, let’s think about...

Making Connections: What things do you do to make it a lovely day? What are some ways that you or others help change your mindset?

Listening to music is one way to calm your body or brighten your mood. You can listen to the song by Bill Withers here:

Check out what your child has been learning to develop their fine motor skills and prepare them for handwriting. This letter contains ways to help develop writing readiness at skills at home.

Check out what your child has been learning in math this month -- it’s more than just playing with pumpkins and leaves! Your child has been building strong foundational math skills they will come back to learning more about as mathematicians as they grow.

November brings a focus 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.

The upcoming holiday season is about being grateful, giving, and connection with those you love. When you turn on the TV, flip through a store ad, walk through the store, etc. it is often difficult to keep sight of the “reason for the season.” This is even more true for young children who are naturally egocentric little beings - and it is developmentally appropriate for them to be that way! It is our job to teach and model for young children empathy, kindness, compassion, helpfulness, and so on. If you are like most parents (including me!) this is no easy task! Do you sometimes struggle with helping your child learn that the world does not revolve around them? Below are some helpful hints for helping to instill an attitude of gratitude in your little one this holiday season through being of service to others.

Did you know being of service is not an option? Research shows being of service is a biological imperative that is required for optimal brain development. Every kind act, every contribution we make reanimates our own life force (Creating the School Family, Dr. Becky Bailey, p.224)

Children can be of service in so many ways during the holiday season. Share with them that you know they are great helpers and involve them in helping you think of ways to be helpful during the holidays. You will be amazed at how involving them in the brainstorming process will help give them some ownership over being helpful - I bet you will even be blown away by some of their suggestions! Remember, for children to feel successful finding things that they can do independently will be important. Here are a few ideas (we can’t wait to hear what you and your child come up with as well!):

• Leave kindness notes for family, friends, and neighbors. Have your child notice how others are being helpful in the world and draw them a picture/write a little “thank you” note for being so helpful! Example (note to sister): Marissa you picked up my socks and put them in the hamper. Thanks! That was helpful. (Child can draw a picture to tell the story of this message as well.)

• Be of service to the family by helping out around the house. Even young children can be helpful with completing daily household chores. Taking out the garbage from the bathroom, unloading the dishwasher, drying dishes, wiping dirty windows or the kitchen table/counters, picking up toys around the house, taking laundry out of the dryer and putting it in a hamper, and bringing folded laundry up to their bedroom and putting it away are all examples of chores that young children can help with. Providing positive feedback along the way and sharing what an impact that has on the time you have to spend with your child can be incredibly encouraging and models for them the importance of gratitude and being of service. Example: Johnny, you brought your laundry upstairs and put it in your dresser. That was so helpful! Now we have time to read an extra book together tonight before bed.

• Random acts of kindness are things that young children are quite good at coming up with! After all, they are the givers of finger painted masterpieces (often at nauseum) and beautiful dandelion bouquets and mud pies. During a stressful holiday season there is no shortage of people in your child’s life who could use a little smile. Involve your child in brainstorming who could use a fun surprise and using what they know about that person to come up with a good idea for what the surprise could be. It is important not to judge your child’s suggestions but steer them towards using what they know about people (children are sponges and excellent observers) to come up with their idea. At the end of the day, knowing that someone took the time to think of you is what will matter most to whoever your child has chosen. :) Examples: Bring your teacher a cup of coffee/tea or a bottle of hand sanitizer during this cold/flu season when everyone is sick. OR Make dad a small bowl out of clay to keep his keys in when he gets home so he can find them right away in the morning when he needs them. OR Donate some gently used or new toys to a shelter, hospital, etc. for children who may not be getting presents this holiday season.

Most importantly: Share with your child when you see them being helpful and kind. Noticing and appreciating this within your child sends a message that you value kindness and helpfulness and models how to be grateful towards others.