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Hi, Dawn, you are quite right, many residents won’t be happy with the situation. Activities for them should be in line with ‘being helpful and needed’. Many residents are driven by a sense of solidarity and social feelings you can explore. Whatever you ask them to do, cooperate, or contribute can satisfy their feelings of belonging. You may have to explain to them that the situation is temporary. Here is some ‘food for thought’ activities that individuals may enjoy in the privacy of their bedrooms.

Time to support Spiritual Practice

Unraveling a wool sweater for recycling

Empowering arts ( modeling clay, drawings, colouring)

Fiddle Boxes

Untying knots (a dozen sailor's knots for them to untie)

Fabric Box (pieces of fabric to be folded and separated by colour)

Pairing and sorting activities: https://www.goldencarers.com/pairing-sorting/3777/

Making Pom-Poms for decorations

Colouring Easter eggs (boiled eggs, and colouring pencils)

Cutting pictures from old calendars for a poster

Cupcakes decorations for Morning tea

You may visit each resident to see how they are going and assist if needed.

Wow what great ideas Solange

I also like to make cards on the computer that needed to be folded and there were questions on the

Allow some residents who are able to fold the cards

and answer some questions on the card

They could also make decorations for their door or room

Hi here are some more ideas

Does your facility have a PA system where you could announce certain things like joke time or trivia time or a sing-along over the loudspeaker and you would not have to have the residents get together but still would provide activities

Also I assume your volunteers are not coming into the facility but they may be available to call some of the residents from their home and just talk to them not as good as in person visits but still there is interaction you could call it phone time or fun with Phone time

You and your staff could call the residents as well and share something that one resident said to another one you would be like the facilitator

1. We are soon to go into lockdown and there will be additional stresses to deal with in the work place for both staff and residents. For my wellbeing as well as that of residents I have looked at several meditation apps and will be doing some guided meditations for relaxation and de- stressing. One on one with residents.

2. Looking at doing information about a different country each week- with word search on the country, make a word, colouring in about the country and a few quiz questions.

3. Lots of sorting activities for resident living with dementia, colour sorting with paint colour swatches from paint stores, sorting out packs of playing cards, leaving clothes and fabric for residents to sort. All things that can be washed or sanitized - or left with the individual.

4. Making a Bored Board or folder containing word searches, colouring, spot the difference etc so that care staff have something to give the residents when they say I am bored.

These are great ideas Margaret thank you very much

We can use our white boards for games like Yahtzee and other word games while keeping or 6” apart. I am asking families to drop off special goods like their favorite candy or photo album.

Also we are going to start using the phrase, physical distancing. The community I work with didn’t like the idea of social distancing.