The residents at Primrose Croft Care Home enjoy taking part in community events. It allows them to engage with the public and connect with those who live locally to the care home. With the festive period approaching, the team have signed up to take part in the Christmas Tree Festival with the residents, held at St Giles Church in Cambridgeshire.
The Christmas Tree Festival runs annually and invites parishes, individuals, clubs and local businesses to decorate a Christmas tree and display it at the festival. The theme changes each year which participants use as a stimulus and this year the chosen theme is ‘hope for the future’.
To get the residents immersed in the theme, Lifestyle and Wellbeing Lead, Pearl, hosted an activity to get the residents thinking.
Using the letters from each word in the phrase ‘Hope for the Future, Pearl asked residents to think of a word for each letter and a corresponding phrase for each. For example, the letter ‘H’, could be used for the word ‘Health’ and the phrase could follow, ‘Maintaining your health is important’.
In haiku format, the residents began thinking about their hopes for the future and words/phrases for each letter. After lots of discussion, the residents came up with:
Happy – Everybody to be happier in life’s blessing.
Optimistic – Thinking optimistic will help the end result.
Positive – Positive thinking makes you feel stronger.
Empathy – Understanding what others are going through and reaching out to help.
Faith – Knowing someone is there for you.
Opportunity – Everyone having the same opportunity in life.
Rejoice – Celebrating is good for wellbeing.
Thankful – Being thankful for the smaller things in life as well.
Heavenly – Everybody should experience the heavenly divine.
Environmental – We must look after our world and be more environmentally friendly.
Friendly – It costs nothing to be friendly to each other.
Unity – We all need to become one to make the world work.
True – We must be true to each other.
Understood – We must listen to each other to understand each other.
Respectful – We need to bring back the respect for each other.
Equality – We do not have the right to judge, we should respect each other for who we are.
This was a really engaging and enjoyable exercise for the residents. I didn’t only get them thinking about their hopes for the future but also reflecting on the past and present too. This activity brought back many happy memories and has really helped to get people ready for the festival.
There was an enjoyable moment during the activity when respect was mentioned, where people began discussing how respect in society has changed. They said that people used to respect their teachers and the police force, but notice this attitude has changed over the years.
Residents June and Josephine thoroughly enjoyed taking part in this activity together. When ‘Friendly’ was mentioned in the activity, they enjoyed telling each other as best friends, they will help each other every day.
If you live locally to Cambridge and would like to attend the Christmas Tree Festival, click here for all the information.
Posted by Excelcare