SENDinMama

SENDinMama Parent-led support for SEND & PDA families. EYFS home ed packs, online course for parents, CPD training, and practical, trauma-informed tools.
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Rooted in lived experience. Empowering families, one step at a time.

October’s book list is live! 🕷️🍄💀This month we’re celebrating all the wonderfully weird things our children find fascina...
01/10/2026

October’s book list is live! 🕷️🍄💀

This month we’re celebrating all the wonderfully weird things our children find fascinating. Think spiders, skeletons, fungi, strange creatures, gross science and plenty of creepy stories for the older ones!

Curious, Creepy & Completely Fascinating has books from toddlers right through to teens and is available now for paid SENDinMama Substack subscribers (£3.50/month). 💛

🔗 https://sendinmama.substack.com/p/big-feelings-little-books-441?r=3z1gi4&utm_medium=ios

Perfect October reading for our curious little minds! 📚🍂

With Love,

SENDinMama 🤍
www.SENDinMama.com

If you completed a PDA Profile Wheel for two different children, the finished shapes could look completely different.One...
12/09/2026

If you completed a PDA Profile Wheel for two different children, the finished shapes could look completely different.

One might show lots of outward distress and obvious avoidance. Another might show masking, withdrawal and a need for a huge amount of recovery time. Neither profile is more or less valid.

Even the same child’s wheel might change depending on whether you are thinking about home, learning, leaving the house or spending time with other adults.

The finished wheel is not a score. It is a snapshot that can help you notice patterns, understand what is creating pressure and think more carefully about what support might actually help.

The PDA Profile Wheel is available now to paid Substack subscribers, or you can buy it separately through the SENDinMama website.

🔗 https://www.sendinmama.com/pdaprofilewheel

With Love,
SENDinMama 🤍

No two PDA children have exactly the same profile.One child’s distress might be very outward and easy to see. Another mi...
09/09/2026

No two PDA children have exactly the same profile.

One child’s distress might be very outward and easy to see. Another might become quiet, compliant, frozen or highly masked. Even the same child can look completely different depending on the setting, the demand and how safe they feel.

That is why I created the PDA Profile Wheel.

It gives parents a simple visual way to explore where demands are felt, what creates additional pressure, how avoidance may work and how strain can appear. It can be used at home, when thinking about home education or as a way of explaining your child’s needs to other adults and professionals.

It is not diagnostic and it does not produce a score. The finished wheel is simply a snapshot of one child, in one context, at one point in time.

Paid Substack subscribers can download it as part of their subscription, and it is also available to buy separately from my website:

www.SENDinMama.com/pdaprofilewheel

With Love,
SENDinMama 🤍

Just popping this one back up because September feels like a pretty pivotal month when it comes to reading.For families ...
09/09/2026

Just popping this one back up because September feels like a pretty pivotal month when it comes to reading.

For families with children in school, the reading books are coming home again and there can suddenly be quite a lot of pressure to practise, practise, practise.

And for home educating families, there can be a different sort of pressure. We want our children to learn to read, but we also don’t necessarily want to recreate school at the kitchen table… particularly when we have a PDA child who is very capable of deciding that they will never look at the letter s again if we push our luck 😂

Part two of my reading series, Phonics Without the Pressure, came out earlier this month and is all about navigating that.

I’ve tried to take what we know about how children learn to read and translate it into something that can actually work for PDA children at home: more choice, more flexibility, more following their interests and far less turning every interaction with a book into a test.

If you missed it the first time around, you can read it here:

Phonics Without the Pressure – Part Two⁠
🔗 https://sendinmama.substack.com/p/part-2-phonics-without-the-pressure?r=3z1gi4&utm_medium=ios

With Love,
SENDinMama 🤍

In case you missed it… September’s book list is waiting for you!This month we’re celebrating special interests, passions...
07/09/2026

In case you missed it… September’s book list is waiting for you!

This month we’re celebrating special interests, passions and deep curiosity… the things our children could talk about, research, collect and explore for HOURS.

From dinosaurs and space to science, animals, inventing and everything in between, I’ve put together books for toddlers right through to teens that celebrate the joy of becoming completely fascinated by something.

Because special interests don’t always need broadening, redirecting or turning into a learning objective.

Sometimes we can just let them love it. 🤍

🔗 https://sendinmama.substack.com/p/big-feelings-little-books-092?r=3z1gi4&utm_medium=ios

🔒 Available now for paid SENDinMama Substack subscribers (£3.50/month)

Save this as your reminder to go and have a look!

With Love,
SENDinMama 🤍

📚 September’s SENDinMama Book List is now live!This month I wanted to celebrate something that brings so much joy to man...
01/09/2026

📚 September’s SENDinMama Book List is now live!

This month I wanted to celebrate something that brings so much joy to many of our neurodivergent children: special interests.

If you’ve ever accidentally become an expert in dinosaurs, Pokémon, trains, flags, Minecraft or some incredibly niche corner of history purely because you live with a child who NEEDS TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT, this month’s list is for you.

Special interests are often viewed through the lens of how we can broaden them or turn them into something useful.

But they already have value.

For many autistic children, a special interest can provide predictability, regulation, confidence and connection. For home-educated children in particular, following those interests can also take learning in directions we could never have planned ourselves.

So this month’s list celebrates children who become fascinated, investigate, collect, create, research and want to know absolutely everything.

There are recommendations from toddlers right through to teens, including plenty for our fact-loving children who would quite happily spend an afternoon reading an encyclopaedia about their current favourite subject.

And no, you don’t have to turn their special interest into a lesson.

Sometimes joy is enough. 💛

🔒 The full list is available now for paid SENDinMama Substack subscribers.

🔗 https://sendinmama.substack.com/p/big-feelings-little-books-092?r=3z1gi4&utm_medium=ios

With Love,
SENDinMama

www.SENDinMama.com

🌍 August’s SENDinMama Book List is now live: Wild Weather, Changing WorldI chose this month’s theme because my own child...
17/08/2026

🌍 August’s SENDinMama Book List is now live: Wild Weather, Changing World

I chose this month’s theme because my own children have been asking innumerable questions about what they are seeing around them at the moment.

Heatwaves. Wildfires. Storms. Flooding.

For children who notice patterns intensely, have a strong sense of justice or need certainty to feel safe, these things can prompt some pretty enormous questions about what is happening to our planet.

And I don’t think the answer is to tell them not to worry.

Instead, we can give them information they can understand, help them make sense of what they’re seeing and remind them that there are adults, scientists, communities and organisations working on these problems too. The future of the planet does not need to sit on a child’s shoulders.

So I’ve put together a collection of books for children from toddlers right through to teens exploring weather, extreme weather, climate change, our planet and the people working to protect it.

Some are beautiful stories. Some are proper fact-filled books for the children who need to know EXACTLY how everything works. (You know the ones. 😂)

🔒 The full list is available now for paid SENDinMama Substack subscribers: https://sendinmama.substack.com/p/big-feelings-little-books-268?utm_source=app-post-stats-page&r=3z1gi4&utm_medium=ios

Paid subscription is £3.50 per month and also includes a downloadable resource every month and my full-length SEND and PDA articles.

I hope this one helps with a few of those very big questions. 🌦️

SENDinMama 🤍

Part Two of my series on helping PDA children learn to read at home is now live! In Part One, I explored the foundations...
08/08/2026

Part Two of my series on helping PDA children learn to read at home is now live!

In Part One, I explored the foundations that come before formal phonics. This time, I’m sharing exactly where I begin: the first sounds I introduce, how I offer meaningful choice, the playful ways we notice phonics in everyday life and how I make progress visible without turning learning into a test.

I’ve also written honestly about:

💛 Adapting systematic phonics without losing its structure
💛 Supporting children with contrasting PDA presentations
💛 My eldest son’s hyperlexia and why his rapid progress should not become another child’s benchmark
💛 The Pokémon-card arrangement that transformed reading practice in our family
💛 Finding what makes reading meaningful enough for an individual child to return to

This is not about recreating school at home or making children comply with phonics lessons. It is about making the process of becoming a reader accurate, accessible and emotionally safe.

You can read the article here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/sendinmama/p/part-2-phonics-without-the-pressure?r=3z1gi4&utm_medium=ios

I would love to hear what has helped your child develop an interest in letters, words or reading.

With Love,
SENDinMama 🤍

01/08/2026

This is the pond near where I grew up 🦆

In my 36 years of life I have never seen the pond even close to this. There is always an abundance of wildlife, beautiful water and a vibrant community of people around it.

I am honestly terrified about what the future holds for my SEND kids, but also just for children in general.

The world is literally on fire 🔥

How are all you Mama’s holding up? Anyone else with climate anxiety?

Let’s talk in the comments 👇🏼

SENDinMama 🤍

I’m looking to speak to parents or carers who are currently educating a PDA child aged approximately 7–13 at home.I’m pa...
30/07/2026

I’m looking to speak to parents or carers who are currently educating a PDA child aged approximately 7–13 at home.

I’m particularly interested in an example of something your child understood or could do but found difficult to demonstrate under pressure, and what changed when the demands surrounding their learning were reduced. I would love to know about how this affected your understanding of your own role in their learning.

This is for a sample chapter I’m preparing for Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Any contribution could be anonymised, and I would send you the adapted passage for approval before using it.

If you would be willing to send me a short written response by commenting on this post or sending me a message by 4 August, I would be overcome with gratitude!

There is absolutely no obligation for anything you share to be included.

With Love,

SENDinMama 🤍
www.SENDinMama.com

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