Cara

We had so much fun playing this with both residents and staff and families. We kept it secret to have an element of surprise. we just promoted the game as Irish Carpet Bowls, didn't mention Potatoes or turnips, with everyone asking what's Irish Carpet Bowls, how do you play it. We kept up the suspense by telling them you'll have to come along and find out. We also added a little twist, we play carpet bowls in teams of two, so we coloured our potatoes red & blue and we added lots of lucky 4 leaf clovers to our carpet mat to give the residents more opportunity to win as the potatoes have a mind of their own, but here's my evaluation of using food dye as suggested by our Irish chef (bad idea) as the dye also stains your hands, so we sealed the potatoes with clear gloss to stop the food colour leaching onto your hands which made the potatoes lovely and glossy, but not such a good idea to do this on a weekend before your games on the day, cause by the time you play, the potatoes are getting soft spots resulting in roars of laughter when the residents heard the potatoes go splat and split in places, so we had to apply a quick remedy of wrapping the potatoes in glad wrap resulting in more laughter. So if you want to colour your potatoes don't use food colour. We are yet to solve this issue of colouring or adding something to distinguish teams for this years game, but I'm sure whatever we do it will be lots of fun, like others, the roars of laughter from discovering they are rolling potatoes brought everyone to the activity room to find out what the heck are they all laughing at., which in turn resulted in staff joining in and having fun. You can use Red potatoes and White potatoes but they are more uniform in shape, its much more fun with the larger odd size shape potatoes.

I like that idea Maureen, pass it to the player on their right. Will try that one with Hoy.
To add variety to bingo, we add themes to the game for example if bingo falls on St Patricks Day we decorate the tables in green and add lucky leprechauns , 4 leaf clovers & gold coins with a lucky number on them. We simply insert images into a word document and type a lucky number on them, then print and cut out and let everyone select their lucky number to which they win a special prize if their lucky number is called. We also do this with Black Friday where we hold a Black Tie dress day where residents dress up with splashes of black and their favourite colour and we have Lucky Black cats, residents love this one. Other themes we do are Easter, Valentines day and coming up is Dress like a Pirate Day where residents dress up, table is Pirate theme and bingo is a treasure map with lucky gold coins. Once a month we also combine bingo with happy hour and residents are given strips of paper with a number on it and while the residents enjoy a glass of wine etc the resident creates the saying to go with their numbers. Once refreshments are over the game begins. We play this differently to usual bingo the caller walks around the room with a microphone and gets the resident to call their number and saying, often resulting in lots of laughter. Residents with reduced cognition who need support are supplied with a pre-printed simple call for example 2 little ducks and the caller or volunteer assists them to play.