April showers bring May flowers! And let’s celebrate the rain instead of the flowers! Purchase umbrellas from a discount store and clean out your craft closet to provide residents with a choice of paints, fabrics, pompons, streamers, stickers, and more.
Have participants work on their own or in groups to make a beautiful umbrella art piece. To end your program, hang the umbrellas from the ceiling of your activity room or hallway. Invite residents, staff, and family members to check out your Umbrella Art Show.
Serve Rainy Day Cocktails (any drink with a paper umbrella garnish will do), and you could even end with a showing of Singin’ in the Rain.
Bring a bit of greenery into each of your residents’ rooms with this activity. A desert terrarium can be created with cuttings from succulent plants people already have at home. Involve staff and family members to bring some in!
Give each resident a terracotta, stone, or ceramic container. Have garden spades and a box of potting mixture within easy access. Show them how to cover the container’s drainage holes with recycled vegetable netting or a piece of fabric so the soil won’t fall from the container. Fill the containers ¾ of the way with soil mixture and top with one inch of sand.
Arrange 3 or 4 different kinds of succulents in the terrariums. Place pebbles or small river stones around the plants. Decorate with ornaments such as ceramic frogs, lizards, and turtles. To care for your desert terrarium, place it in a sunny place and water once a week in summer and every two weeks in winter.
Get your residents in the spring spirit by hanging these colourful egg carton flowers everywhere in your community! It’s a good way to use those egg cartons from your community’s kitchen to bring some vibrancy in your home.
Give each resident an egg carton and a black marker. Show them how to cut the individual egg cups from the carton, drawing guidelines first if necessary. Then, cut the tops of the egg cups into rounded points so they look like petals. Staff or volunteers could assist residents to make the edges as neat as possible.
Supply your residents with paint and paintbrushes so they can decorate their flowers. To make the flowers into a garland, thread a needle with string. With a black marker, make a dot every 5 inches or so to make sure the flowers are evenly spaced. Make a small hole in the back of the flower and pass the needle through it. Knot the thread a few times so the flower stays in place, and repeat with the remaining flowers. You can hang your garland from ceilings, doors, verandas, and so on.
Do you have some old or small crayons that you don’t want to throw out but don’t know what else to do with? You can recycle them by making a beautiful crayon sun catcher with your residents. This activity requires a clothing iron and ironing board, so keep this in mind when you’re reaching out to invite residents to attend.
For this activity, you’ll need a template for your suncatcher design. Print some out online or ask your residents to design their own. Trace the templates onto black construction paper and cut them out.
Grate the crayons one colour at a time and store the shavings in small containers. If the pieces of crayon are too small to grate, place them in a microwave-safe cup and melt them in a microwave. Pour the melted crayons into a mold, allow to cool, and then you’ll be able to grate them.
Set down a sheet of newspaper and place a sheet of wax paper on top. Scatter different colours of crayon shavings on the wax paper. Put another sheet of wax paper on top, and another sheet of newspaper on top of that. Iron the wax paper and crayon between the two sheets of newspaper. The iron should be on a low heat setting, NOT HOT. Put aside to cool.
Once the wax paper is fully cooled down, glue your suncatcher template on top and cut around the excess. Make a hole at the top of the suncatcher and insert a string so you can hang it up in front of a window!
Coffee Filter Sunflowers is an art program that is inexpensive and can bring some colour to your community. For this activity, you’ll need coffee filters, crayons, scissors, glue, and green construction paper or cardstock.
Hand each participant a few coffee filters and encourage them to colour them with crayons (the filters are not suitable for painting). Place 3 or 4 of the coloured filters on top of each other and fold them in half, then in quarters. Then, cut the circular end of the filters to form the shape of petals. To make this step easier, you can print out a template of a flower and place it on top of the filters as a guide. Glue the center of each flower onto the next, leaving the petals free. You can cut stems out of cardstock and glue those to the flowers as well. Hang the flowers up on walls, doors, or in your residents’ bedrooms.
Note: If coffee filters are not available use crepe paper or tissue paper in different shades of yellow, orange, and red. This would be mainly a 'cutting' activity since colouring is not necessary, but glitter and foil confetti can be used to decorate them.
This is a great opportunity to both bake and have some fun by getting your residents to write their own fortunes or lucky numbers on small pieces of paper. Make sure to write fortunes on strips of paper that are about 4 inches long and 1/2 inch wide so they will fit in the cookies. Then, set the fortunes aside and have the residents help with creating the dough for the fortune cookies.
To make the fortune cookies, you will need:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F and generously grease 2 cookie sheets. Mix the egg white and vanilla until foamy but not stiff. Sift the flour, salt, and sugar and blend into the egg white mixture.
Place teaspoonfuls of the batter at least 4 inches apart on one of the prepared cookie sheets. Tilt the sheet to move the batter into round shapes about 3 inches in diameter. Be careful to make the batter as round and even as possible. Do not make too many at once because you will need to mold the cookies into shape while they’re still really hot. Once they cool down, it’s too late! Start with 2 or 3 to a sheet and see how many you can do.
Bake for 5 minutes or until the cookie has turned a golden color 1/2 inch wide around the outer edge of the circle. The center will remain pale. While one sheet is baking, prepare the other.
Remove from oven and quickly move the cookies with a wide spatula and place upside down on a wooden board. Quickly place the fortune on the cookie, close to the middle and fold the cookie in half. Place the folded edge across the rim of a measuring cup and pull the pointed edges down, one on the inside of the cup and one on the outside. Place folded cookies into the cups of a muffin tin or egg carton to hold their shape until firm.
Have residents exchange cookies to pick their fortunes!
The scent guessing game is a great opportunity to stimulate the senses and reminisce with residents. You can make it conversational or create a game where residents write down their guesses and compare answers.
To play this game, you’ll first need to gather various things with distinctive scents like ground coffee, cinnamon sticks, dried lavender, rose petals, lemon, and mint. Put each one in its own paper bag so that your residents can’t see what it is.
Seat two to three residents around a table and pass around a scent, asking them to guess what it is. Encourage them by giving them clues like “It smells like something we drink in the morning” or “It smells like something we sprinkle on donuts.”
Who doesn’t love to have great smelling soap? Encourage your residents to join to create their own soap with the scents that they love!
Here are the ingredients you’ll need for each soap bar:
To make the bars, combine the grated soap with water, food colouring, scented oil, and hand lotion in a bowl. The mixture will be thick, so you’ll need to combine the ingredients using your hands. First, cover your hands with hand cream to prevent sticking and to stop the food colouring from staining your skin. The soap can either be shaped freehand or you can use silicone chocolate or cupcake molds greased with hand cream to form shapes. Decorate the soap bar by putting a dried or artificial flower on top!
This is a simple game that can be made of empty tins or empty plastic containers. The tins or containers can be decorated in a craft session. This could also easily be made into an intergenerational program!
To begin, gather some empty cans and containers from the kitchen. Soak them in warm soapy water to remove the labels. Place two layers of masking tape over the edge of each can for safety. Once you’ve prepped the cans and containers, your residents can decorate them in bright colours using paint, tissue paper, or paper mâché.
To play the game, stack the cans in a pyramid and have your residents sit a few meters away. Using a soft ball or beanbag, have your residents try to knock down as many cans as possible. The resident who knocks down the most cans is the winner! This game can also be played as a team tournament. For instance, you can play a game of fifty points and award one point for each can knocked down. Whichever team reaches fifty points first wins! To make the game more exciting, add prizes.
Start collecting those bottles! It’s seated bottle ring toss time!
To play this game, you’ll need as many bottles as you like and five rings. Get different types of bottled beverages, including soda, mineral water, and juice. You can use embroidery hoops or plastic rings if you have them. You can also make your own rings by shaping rope into a circle and wrapping it with duct tape. The size of the rings depends on the dexterity of your residents. The bigger the ring, the easier it will be to land on the bottles!
Set up six to eight bottles on a coffee table in any arrangement you like. Get a chair for residents to sit in while they’re taking their turn. Each resident gets to toss five rings. The goal of the game is to get at least one hoop around a bottle. If the resident succeeds, let them choose which beverage they want to keep as a prize! Replace the bottles and let the next resident take their turn.
