APRIL ACTIVITIES

April Showers brings........fun activities.  April was a pretty busy month around our facility.  We of course had a monthly birthday party.  This cake above was too cool to pass up.  I just had them add April Birthdays and we partied like it was tye-dye cool 1970. The residents were even more energetic in the month of April.  They were dancing and swinging in their chairs at the birthday party.

One of the Spring activities we did was make these cute Hummingbird Nests. So super easy.  Use equal parts melted chocolate chips and coconut and mix together.  Have residents shape into a nest. Add jelly beans.  Give to other residents and eat and enjoy.

Alzheimer's busy hands sorted jelly beans by color and counted jelly beans.....and of course ate most of them.

Our painting group painted little wooden animals.  This is one of the residents "doggy." They painted turtles, squirrels, cats, bears, and dogs.  

Of course with Easter comes egg coloring.  Our residents color around 100 eggs.  They are dried and refrigerated and each residents gets a color egg with their Easter Dinner.

To help raise money for our activity department we had an Easter Basket raffle.  I got our hospice companies to donate 5 baskets and our activity department made one.  We had 6 baskets to raffle off.  It was a great success.

Don't forget Peter Cotton Tail.  Yes the Easter bunny visit our facility and took pictures and handed out candy to residents.  This was a great opportunity to get residents who don't normally get in the newsletter to get their pictures in.  They all loved him although he looks a bit creepy in this picture.

Alzheimer's residents also strung cereal onto yarn to make bird feeders to hang outdoors on the trees.  It's a great activity to help them concentrate on something and it's super simple and super cheap.

Tissue paper flowers give residents smiling power.  We had a total tissue paper flower morning.  Not everyone wanted to make a flower, but they sure all wanted one for their wheel chair or rooms.  We made tons of these babies.  I ended up making some extras to take to my Gram in the hospital, and to put in the top of my mom's gift bag for her birthday present. Super easy.

Alzheimer's residents took cut up pieces of tissue paper and glued them onto a coloring sheet of a butterfly.  Making pretty purple, pink, yellow butterflies.

Decorating Easter bunny shaped cookies. This was actually a kit I picked up at Wal-Mart.  It came with everything you needed to make these cookies (except a little butter & a little milk to make frosting) and they were actually very tasty.  

The Easter Bunny & me.

Some other activities we did this month:

For April Fool's Day we made Purple Cows.  What, you say? Purple Cows are vanilla ice cream and grape soda.  Sort of like a root beer float, but with grape soda.  Something goofy for April Fool's.  It was surprising tasty.

One of the bulletin boards for the month I decorated with baseball facts, trivia, and pictures.  Official opening day April 1st.

Games: Tic-Tac-Toe, I Want It Game, High Rollers, Wheel of Fortune, Pokeno, and of course Bingo

We also celebrated Twinkies birthday.  By what else?........eating Twinkies, duh.

Other activities: Wine & cheese social, Sing-A-Long, Bible Trivia, Manicures, Exercise, making bread(more like eating bread), and Music Entertainment.

Passover: residents enjoyed Grape juice and Passover Coconut Macaroons while visiting. 

Passover Coconut Macaroons
2 egg whites
1/2 tsp. vanilla
dash of salt
2/3 cup sugar
1 1/3 cups coconut flakes
Grease a cookie sheet
Beat the egg whites, vanilla, and salt w/ electric mixer until soft peaks form. Slowly add sugar and beat until stiff peaks form.
Fold in coconut gently.
Drop by teaspoonfuls onto cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.
When macaroons are cooled, they can be dipped in melted chocolate for variety.
Makes 23 Macaroons

MARCH ACTIVITIES

Oh man I am so far behind on this activities thing.  Once I get this post done I should start working on April activities. :)
I have been a bad blogger lately. 
Stress, stress, and more grey hairs.

MARCH ACTIVITIES

A month full of green, green, green!!!

These are cute & super duper easy King Cakes I made for our Mardi Gra celebration.  You take 2 cans of Cinnamon rolls (that come with icing) you separate & straighten putting them in kind of a circle sort of braid thing.  You bake according to Cinnamon roll directions or until not doughy & done. Let cool.  You top with the 2 things of icing that came with the Cinnamon rolls.  You then separate out 3 bowls of sugar and add food coloring to each bowl.  One purple, one, green, and one yellow.  Sprinkle GENEROUSLY with different colors sugars. And you got yourself a super simple King Cake. ***The pic above is done with 4 cinnoman roll cans.

Residents decorated Mardi Gra masks with glitter, beads, feathers, pipe cleaner and pretty much anything craft supply I could find.  Some even hot glued their beads to their masks.

Painting with newspaper or Newspaper Art.  Basically we crumpled up newspaper pieces and dipped in paint and blotted onto canvas/paper.  Abstract Art.

Simple things for cooking class.  This month we made Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Filled Bugles.  All you need is Bugles, peanut butter, and melted chocolate.  You spoon peanut butter into the funnel part of the bugle and then you dip it into the melted chocolate and put on wax paper to dry.  These Bugles were only dipped in chocolate on the ends, but you can dip the whole Bugle in chocolate.

Shamrock Crowns.  

Shamrock Necklaces.

St. Patrick's Day Party time.  Residents wore their Shamrock Crowns & Shamrock Necklaces to the St. Patricks Day Party. We ate green cookies and drank green punch and watched some cute little ladies called The Dancing Queens boogie down for us.  Everything was decked out in green, green, green and everyone wore green, green, green.

March Birthday party with yummy cake.

The Dirt Canyon Band rocked out our March birthday party.

Some other activities that we did this month that I do not have pictures of:

Our Red Hat ladies decorated cupcakes with green icing and green sprinkles. They ate their cupcakes and passed out the rest to staff and other residents. The Red Hat ladies all wear their different cute little red hats to the meetings.

We played the Wheel of Fortune game. Pretty simple.  Use a large dry erase board and put dashes where there are suppose to be letters and a category title.  Participants guess letters.  If they guess a letter that is in the phrase they get a dime.  If they solve the puzzle they get a quarter. Good for the brain and good for the pocket book.

We started playing a game called I Want It Game. Depending on your players will depend on how many prizes you have, because ideally you would like each player to walk away with one thing.  Although that does not always happen.  Your prizes can be a can of soda, candy bar, stuffed animals, figurines, paper fans, bag of chips and anything little thing you can think of.  And then there is the IT.  The IT is an envelope that has money in it as much as your budget allows.  I do $3-$5 depending on my budget.  Each player has a cloth napkin they keep in their lap.  All the prizes are laid out on the table.  You need 2 decks of cards.  One deck for you and one deck for the players.  You go around the table and deal out all the cards so each player has the same amount of cards.  You may have a few left over.  Just lay aside.  The players have their cards laid out in front of them face up.  You then use the other deck to call out card numbers.  The player that has that card gets to pick something on the table they want and they turn over their used card.  That player then puts their prize under the napkin in their lap.  As the game goes on and the prizes have all been taken off the table players can take prizes from other players.  They just have to remember what the prize is they want and who has the prize by pointing to that person.  This is a great memory game.  Players do not have to wait until all prizes are off the table before taking from other players though.  Once every card has been called and every players cards are face down the game is over and the prizes you have under your napkin are yours to keep.

We also started a new game this month called Pokeno.  This is a game you can use decks of cards & bingo chips or you can buy the Pokeno game that comes with 12 playing cards. Pokeno is a game sort of like poker and Bingo mashed together.  The Pokeno cards have playing cards on them that go five across and five down.

Each player gets a playing card and chips.  The game also comes with a deck of cards.  You call out the cards and the player covers that card with a chip if they have it.  Once they get five across, down, diagnol, etc they yell Pokeno and win.  We do candy prizes or quarter prizes. Just a change from the same old Bingo game.

Peace, Love, & Hugs

FEBRUARY ACTIVITIES

A little back story: 
While I was in Texas I by an act of faith got the opportunity to get into my dream job.  An Activity Director at a Long Term Care Facility. It was challenging and wonderful and creative and busy.  Perfect for....well me. I moved back to Missouri in August 2010 to be closer to my family and for some other reasons that.....that well are none of your bees wax. :)~  When I first moved back the job hunt was on like a maniac.  Followed by weeks of sending resumes everyday and interviews with no results.  So finally I went to temp agency and ended up getting a position at a mortgage company which I have many previous years of experience.  In January 2011 the market slowed WAY down and abruptly all the temps were let go.

I went into total freak out.  Yo bills to pay....yo kids to feed...and all that jazz.  I kept telling myself God has a plan girl.  There is a reason.  Get back on the resume/interview ferris wheel and it will work out.  Almost two weeks into being off and I was getting..........well what the hell do you think? DISCOURAGED! DEPRESSED! FREAK THE HELL OUT! I got a call on one of my resumes from a Long Term Care Facility.  Of which since being back in Missouri I had went on about 4 with not happy endings.  But I called them back and set up the interview.  Faith baby FAITH! So I went to the interview and the Administrator was very cool.  The staff was cool.  And interview was going great.  BUT so had some of the others.  I had walked out of interviews thinking I TOTALLY NAILED THAT & I totally got this job....to end with not getting the job.  This economy BLOWS by the way.  But at the end of the interview the Administrator said she really thought I was a great fit.  She offered me the job on the spot.  SHOCKED? Uhm hell yeah....again this economy has not been good on my self esteem.  So after a tour and meeting the other department heads I excepted the job. To start the following Monday.  


My two weeks of torment were over.  My worry would end.  I would still be able to feed my kids and keep a roof over there head.  AND IT'S THE PERFECT JOB FOR ME! I love working with seniors.  This position was just made for me.  It's business and creativity.  It's helping people.  I decided I would start a monthly blog of pics of some of the highlights/activities we did that month.  I can't show pictures of the residents or anything, but you can kind of get the idea from the pics.  This month all my pics were taken with my cell phone so the pics aren't the best, but this is a new blog post so there is always room for improvement.

I am so so excited about this job and opportunity I want to share what I can about this. Working with seniors is rewarding and challenging and wonderful and stressful, but like I've said a few times already in this blog IT'S THE PERFECT JOB FOR ME. 


So without further wait these are the photos from the activities of February:


A bake sale to help fund residents Valentine's Day party.  Funny, yummy, goodies.

Tissue paper and heart craft Valentine the residents  made for their rooms and to give to family/friends.

Cooking Class we decorating cookies in a Valentine theme of course.  Residents decorated for themselves and other residents and staff.  Icing and sprinkles galore.

The Valentine's Party.  Fun decorating.  We crowned a King & Queen of Hearts, had yummy cupcakes, and music music music.

A visit from farm animals.  This was the cutest thing I've ever seen.  I saw so many of the residents come alive watching the animals walk around, feeding them crackers, and holding them. We had very high participation for this. I am going to have them back in late spring because they then have all the new born baby farm animals. :)

The goat kept pooping on the floor and it really comes out like little pellets. Weird.

Thanks for reading my Activity Director journey.  More to come each month.

Peace, Love, & Hugs