Activities at Wheatlands Care Home

To celebrate World Music Day on Wednesday 21st June residents enjoyed a Zoom call from Much Wenlock Nursery School the children sang and performed for the residents in our memory lane community. They all thoroughly enjoyed it and loved seeing the little children’s faces on the television and them being able to talk to them it was even more special for one resident Ruth as she used to be a primary school teacher and it brought lots of memories flooding back about yesteryears of her being a teacher and also when she was at Primary school.

After a few months of planning am pleased to say our first official day of our Co-creation project with Royal Airforce Museum Midlands has begun. Over the coming months our residents will be helping Paula the community engagement manager from Royal Airforce Museum Midlands and her team of amazing volunteers Victoria , Mike and Paul to co-create and develop immersive boxes that then will be lent out via the Museum for children's groups, schools to residential and care homes. We enjoyed looking at selection of handling objects that could possibly be used for the immersive loan boxes. Residents enjoyed talking about their own experiences and sharing their memories with the team from Royal Air Force Cosford. We can't wait for our next meeting and are. Looking forward to watching the project develop.

Keeping in touch with family is really important to our residents. Wendy speaks to her daughter numerous times a week be it in person, over the telephone or Via facetime.

As Sharon Wendy’s daughter is visiting family in Bali for 3 weeks its hard for Wendy to  be able to talk to Sharon due to the time difference in quality of the internet. Sharon emailed the home and asked that we sit and read though a letter she wrote her mum and sent via email.

Wendy enjoyed reading the letter ‘ I can’t believe Matthew and Benjamin are old enough to be graduating’

‘It sounds like Benjamin being laid back he’s always been like that’ she said.

After enjoying reading the letter we drafted a reply and I sent back via email.

Dementia action week saw various activities throughout our memory lane community from gardening and sowing our forget me not seeds a symbol used by the alzheimer’s society to a morning of sport including table tennis and air hockey. We also enjoyed a fantastic 1950’s reminiscence session over a coffee and a slice of homemade cake. The topic of conversation was the hate of getting into a cold tin bath in front of the fire on a Sunday afternoon and ensuring you weren’t naughty otherwise you would be the last child to use the bath.

Val has always had a love and passion for gardening but has been unable to enjoy for some time due to not being able to get down low enough to weed and prune. She now has a beautiful raised flower bed that she can stand and tend to and watch bloom and flourish from her bedroom window. She’s now looking forward to getting her hanging baskets ‘Flowers put a smile on everyone’s faces and makes a dull day so much brighter’ val told us over a cuppa in our sensory garden.

We run a gentleman’s club monthly here at Wheatlands but no matter how much we tried one gentleman never wished join in. He has fond love of making things and tinkering so this month we took a different approach and brought some airfix models that Martin used to love to make. Martin then led the club for the morning showing fellow residents how to build the airfix model sharing his expertise and knowledge.