Dingley’s Promise helping children with SEND during lockdown
Support for West Berkshire families
DO you have a child or children with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) in the early years?
If so, this new weekly article might be just what you are looking for as you are on lockdown with your family in West Berkshire.
Dingley’s Promise works with children with SEND in the early years to give them the best start.
Until a few short weeks ago we ran our West Berkshire Centre during term time and supported families through our family support worker programme.
Now that our centre has had to close, we have changed our family support programme and made it easy for you to access remotely.
You don’t have to be a family who attends one of our centres to access this support – in times like these we want to help support as many families as we can.
What can we offer you?
Every week during the coronavirus crisis, we will write a new column in the Newbury Weekly News to share new ideas and information with you.
This might be:
Videos you can watch with your child to support their learning.
Information and advice for you on supporting your child at home.
Wellbeing advice and information for you and your family.
Links to websites or pages created by others that might be useful.
On top of this, we can also give you access to one-to-one family support over the phone or by email, so you can have a chat with someone who will listen to you openly.
Our family support worker in West Berkshire is Paula and you can contact her by email (paula.chambers@dingley.org.uk) or by phone (07495 446053).
If you want to meet other parents of children with SEND or stay in touch with friends, you can access our private family support group on Facebook and attend our online drop-in sessions that take place twice a week.
In the coming weeks we will also introduce an evening session where you can meet other families when the children are in bed.
This week we are launching a new section on our website with lots of resources for you to tap into.
The first section of resources are from our own practitioners, who are working hard to give you ideas for activities to do with your children, and the second section is resources created by other organisations that you can also use at home.
There are also contact details for support, updates on what Dingley’s Promise is doing, and a free training offer for
mainstream early years practitioners so they can develop their skills in supporting children inclusively.
The address is https://www.dingley.org.uk/ covid-19-response/
Next week we will share more ideas and resources, and if you have any thoughts on what you would like to see, or what
information you need, please do get in touch with Paula so she can arrange for this to be found or created.
Stay safe this week, and we hope you will have fun with the resources we have shared.