Guided meditation is a strategy to get residents introduced to the beneficial habit of meditation. Meditation presents a great many benefits to all, especially to our seniors. It promotes better focus, enhanced calmness, less stress, and improved sleep, especially during the trying times of Covid-19. In addition, meditation stimulates memory retention and can aid to slow down the worsening of dimension and Alzheimer's.
Many youtube channels create guided meditation videos. Introduce your resident to one of these videos to get them started!
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Some residents might already be aware of radio or TV delivered mass and religious ceremonies. However, other residents might not have thought of them. This could be the perfect spiritual activity for such residents who are feeling like they are missing an important spiritual part of life these days.
Facilitate access to these services by researching their broadcast dates and reminding residents. Having a radio installed in a resident's room would also be a great gift and facilitator for this activity.
Check out the original idea here.
Storytelling Cafe provides a platform for seniors to share personal stories, memories, and experiences in a supportive and welcoming environment.
While Covid is keeping us in isolation, take the extra time residents have and use it to promote reflection. Reflecting on happy memories can be extremely beneficial for residents, especially if they are struggling during these hard times. Encourage our loved ones to journal their thoughts and to reflect on their life. Meditation can be another great tool for reflection.
To extend this spiritual activity to a group, host a meditation session in a common area. Have residents sit in very comfortable chairs, dim the lights and play comfortable music. Make sure all residents are properly distanced from each other and have the proper personal protective equipment. Finally, simply allow your residents a period of uninterrupted reflection.
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In a blog, Lovely Jubbly describes a Sun catcher as a small ornament, usually hanging on the inside of a window, that reflects sunlight into a room. They can easily be crafted using glass or beads. This is a great way to keep seniors engaged and keep their room bight and vibrant during the winter time! When the sunlight is reflected through the sun catcher and into the room, beautiful colours dance around the room.
Here is an article showing you how you can make a sun catcher with beads, beading wire and a pendant!
Wind chimes can be made with a variety of materials. Residents can create their own windchimes by recycling unused items that can make noise into their windchimes. Ideas are old keys, beads, or earnings. The basics of a windchime are:
The frame can be a recycled piece of driftwood or a branch for a natural look. From the frame, either drill holes to pass the line through or tie the line around the frame. Then hang the lines and attach all of your chimes at the end. Make sure there is enough length in the line for the wind to blow the chimes, and that the chimes are very close together. the final step would be to find a way to hang the chime outside the resident's window!
This activity can be transformed into a group activity by making every resident donate one 'chime' to the wind chime and have them install their donation to the project. After all the chimes are attached, the windchime can be placed on open ground in the community's yard for all to enjoy.
Check out the original idea here.
Paper flowers are a wonderful and colourful alternative to real flowers for decoration, especially during the winter season. Making them is also an enjoyable activity!
Tissue paper is the best material to use to make beautiful paper flowers. It has the best texture and comes in many different colours. Your resident can make flowers of any size. They are easy to hang on a wall by applying tape on the backside. They can be assorted into a vase as well by skewering them with wooden sticks of different lengths to resemble a real bouquet!
Here is a DIY tutorial showing you how to make easy tissue paper flows!
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Did you know that the soaps we buy can be made at home, with just a few tools and ingredients, and be much better for our skin? It's true! With a few moments of preparation, your residents can be making their own soaps, enough for the entire community!
Soap making from scratch generally can be made with two processes: cold process & hot process. The two are exactly the same except for an extra heating step of the soap mixture before leaving it to set in the hot process. Consequently, the hot process produces ready-to-use soap in only a few days, while the cold process takes 6 weeks for the soap to fully cure and be ready to use.
Soap is made with only 3 basic ingredients: liquid + fat + lye. Yes, you have to use lye to make soap. It is the magic ingredient that mixes with fats to create soap. And, with the right safety gear, ventilation and precaution, everyone making soap can stay safe and enjoy the activity! For more information about lye in the soap making process, read this article.
The tools you need to make your own hot process soap, and which can be purchased used for very little and kept for all residents to use, are the following:
Here is an article describing every step of making hot process soap by yourself. It details everything you need to know and do to make soap correctly that can be used in just a few days to a week! It also touches on a soap recipe you can use, but you can always change the mixture yourself.
Remember too to always run your recipe through a lye calculator to assure you're using enough fats to neutralize all of the lye in your soap!
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Alternatively, for an easy and quick activity involving soap, have residents combine, colour and shape their own soap form soap scraps! No cooking or lye involved. Click here for instructions on this fun activity.
Flowers are beautiful, and most people think you can't have them in the winter time. Get your floral-loving residents out there fighting the winter blues by inspiring them to make their own winter flora arrangement!
Winter flora arrangements use plants that keep their colour throughout the winter to make something beautiful. The colours of these arrangements are distinctively wintery; think reds, browns, darks blues and purples, whites and greens! The best part of this activity for residents is that going out and collecting plants for their own arrangement is an activity onto itself. Key pieces can be distinctive branches, conifers, berries bushes and pine cones! Residents can even purchase flowers at a grocery store and enhance their bouquet with winter plants as an easier version of this idea.
Click here for the original idea.
Making bird feeders is an activity that can be made easier or more involved to suit your resident!
More complicated bird feeders requiring wood craft, maybe even carving, could be started in the winter months to be made ready and beautiful for the springtime. On the other hand, there are many simple bird feeder ideas that can be made at any time of the year. Here is an article with 32 different simple bird feeder ideas.
You can show the list to your residents to pick their own projects on a certain day and turn the bird feeder activity into a group one as well, with every resident making their own feeder on a given day. Afterwards, they could be displayed in the hall with the name of the resident who made it. each resident could go down the hall one at a time to enjoy the creation of his or her neighbor. Finally, they could all be hung outside of windows on the same day in celebration of the spring!
Click here for the original idea.
