This deep breathing technique is at the core of many mindfulness and relaxation practices. It may take a lot of practice to get right, but it is well worth the effort! Suitable for all ages. Deep breathing activates our parasympathetic nervous system which slows our heart rate and puts us in a state of rest. It’s needed for a healthy nervous system and gets us feeling calm and relaxed.
Guided relaxation video
Progressive muscle relaxation is an essential skill for learning to calm anxiety, manage your nervous system, and relax. Progressive muscle relaxation is one way to train yourself to relax your muscles and turn on your parasympathetic nervous system little by little, progressively.
5 minute video for relaxation and regulation. This is a calming brain break suitable for all ages.
Now in a revised and updated 6th edition, the groundbreaking, research-based approach to understanding and parenting children who frequently exhibit severe fits of temper and other challenging behaviors, from a distinguished clinician and pioneer in the field.
What’s an explosive child? A child who responds to routine problems with extreme frustration—crying, screaming, swearing, kicking, hitting, biting, spitting, destroying property, and worse. A child whose frequent, severe outbursts leave his or her parents feeling frustrated, scared, worried, and desperate for help. Most of these parents have tried everything-reasoning, explaining, punishing, sticker charts, therapy, medication—but to no avail. They can’t figure out why their child acts the way he or she does; they wonder why the strategies that work for other kids don’t work for theirs; and they don’t know what to do instead.
Dr. Ross Greene, a distinguished clinician and pioneer in the treatment of kids with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges, has worked with thousands of explosive children, and he has good news: these kids aren’t attention-seeking, manipulative, or unmotivated, and their parents aren’t passive, permissive pushovers. Rather, explosive kids are lacking some crucial skills in the domains of flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving, and they require a different approach to parenting.
60 Nourishing Recipes and a Nutritional Toolkit for Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, ADHD, Autism and all Neurodivergent Kids
Brain Brilliance offers 60 delicious and nutritious recipes as well as a wealth of diet and supplement tips and hacks for children living with unique and special brains. If you are a parent, teacher or carer, you can learn how to help them thrive and live their best neurodivergent life…with a little bit of nutritional know-how. The best news
is that no one needs to wait for a diagnosis to benefit from better diet and nutrition. You can begin nourishing your child’s brain cells right away, setting the foundations for a healthier and happier future.
In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson offer a revolutionary approach to child rearing with twelve key strategies that foster healthy brain development, leading to calmer, happier children. The authors explain—and make accessible—the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. The “upstairs brain,” which makes decisions and balances emotions, was under construction until the mid-twenties. And especially in young children, the right brain and its emotions tend to rule over the logic of the left brain. No wonder kids throw tantrums, fight, or sulk in silence. By applying these discoveries to everyday parenting, you can turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child’s brain and foster vital growth.
Complete with age-appropriate strategies for dealing with day-to-day struggles and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, The Whole-Brain Child shows you how to cultivate healthy emotional and intellectual development so that your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives.
Amazon Link
Brainstorm Health® is a unique clinic focused on providing a Functional Medicine approach to supporting the health and wellbeing of children and young adults.
We specialise in working with children and young adults with Autism, ADHD, ADD, PANS and PANDAS, as well as those with behavioural and learning difficulties and food and chemical sensitivities.
A word-finding difficulty is when a person knows and understands a particular word, but has difficulty retrieving it from their brain to use in their speech. This is similar to how we sometimes feel something is on the ‘tip of our tongue’. Children might not able able to find the word at all, they might retrieve a word that sounds similar to the one they want or they might produce a nonsense word. Check out this website to learn more about the signs that indicate a word-finding difficulty and how you can help support at home. The linked document below also contains prompts which we use at school to help support retrieval of the word they are looking for.
Ever seen ‘Blanks Level’ written in your child’s PLP target or annual review report? This refers to a language model which we can use to map and model understanding and use of abstract language. There are 4 levels which go from talking about things directly in front of you to talking about abstract ideas. Below is a video, plus one of our resources.
Gesher’s Guide to Blanks Questioning
There are two ways in which we may learn language: ‘Analytical’ processing and ‘Gestalt’ processing. Typically we think of language development as learning single words and building them up to full sentences – this is called analytical processing of language. Gestalt Language Processors on the other hand, will start by using whole ‘learned’ phrases, progress toward using single words, and then build their back up to more functional and ‘spontaneous’ phrases. Understanding which way our children are learning language will not only help us to understand them more effectively, but also help us to further support their development of functional communication.
Below you can find a video which explains more plus a link to one of our PDFs on the topic and a website which contains some top tips for parents.
