Activities at Four Hills Care Home

This month residents chose a Country & Western theme for our monthly themed day. The home was decorated with flags and bunting, the chef prepared a special themed menu for the day.

In the morning, we celebrated with games and a quiz followed by an afternoon hoe down with live entertainment from the lovely Malcolm singing all our favourite Country & Western classics. We even tried our hands at some line dancing, which gave us lots of laughs.

It was great to see residents, staff and family members join us for such a fun day.   

Here at Four Hills, over the last couple of months, residents and staff have made a big joint effort to improve our gardens, with lots of new sensory plants, bringing lots of new smells and colours to our garden. Residents have been spending a lot of time out in the garden tending to the plants.

David has been a great help doing all the watering of the garden. This gives him a great sense of purpose, and he has really enjoyed helping and seeing our garden flourish for all our residents and families to enjoy a nice, relaxing place to use when they visit. Residents have also been making little touches to add to our garden. We have had some lovely stone painting sessions which we plan to make a feature of in the garden. 

Residents at Four Hills were treated to a bread-making masterclass from our Head Chef Richard. He showed us how to make lots of different breads including garlic & chive, curry loaf which our residents have never tried before and traditional bread rolls, residents were keen to share baking tips with each other and this sparked lots of lovely conversations between residents and Richard. 

Gertrude agreed that all breads were delicious and was keen for the chef to do other demonstrations with them. Richard has agreed to make this a monthly feature with next month’s masterclass being on pizza making.  

With a packed lunch especially prepared by the home's hospitality team, we headed down the coast to enjoy a day trip to Largs where we were met by Jean’s daughter and son-in-law, who were visiting the area.

Jean said, “it was fantastic that she got to create some new happy memories with her family”.  We enjoyed a walk along the sea-front with the breeze in our hair before watching the boats whilst enjoying an ice-cream.

We had a wonderful day, sharing stories about our seaside and trips over the years with our families.

As part of life here at Four Hills, we have a wishing tree where residents can place suggestions for different outings or activities that are special to them. This is one of our wishes from our tree.

Helen and May have made great friends with each other since coming to live at Four Hills and thought it would be a lovely idea if they could both do something together.

Both ladies came up with the idea of going shopping and stopping off for a spot of lunch together, so that’s what we did. It was because of our travels to our local retail park. May wanted to go to Matalan for some new tops and Helen wanted to go to Home Bargains as the staff always talk about the great buys and that was true for Helen, who left with a basket full of things for her room, new photo frames and Nik knack’s to make her feel right at home.

The ladies said this had made their week and how fantastic it was doing things that they would do at home and being able to do it together. There were lots of laughs and stories told on our trip in the bus.
The ladies are already planning their next trip together.

Residents are loving our new gardening club, which we have been having weekly since the start of March. We are using our whole-home approach in this project, with our gardening, admin, kitchen and activity teams involved.

Residents have been actively involved in the planning, deciding they want to do lots of things from scratch, what type of plants to grow and what vegetables we would like to start growing after a visit to our local garden centre to see what is in season. 

The first choices were sunflowers, and we tried our hands at green beans and courgettes. Residents love watching the seedlings grow in their bedrooms.

The residents at Four Hills had a fabulous time celebrating St Patrick’s Day. The place was decked out in green, white and gold. In the morning, we enjoyed a virtual tour of Dublin, followed by an Irish-themed quiz.

In the afternoon, we were treated to some Irish classics by our visiting entertainer Angela as we swooned along, tapping our toes, while we enjoyed a few glasses of Guinness and some lovely Irish Whisky kindly donated to us by one of our relatives. 

Everyone commented on what a wonderful time they had socialising together and having lots of fun.

Getting out and about in our community, going to our favourite places is big on our list of priorities here at Four Hills.

We have our wishing tree, where residents can leave comments on places they would like to go. Stuart and Barbara both wanted to go to The Kelvingrove Art Galleries. This is a very special place for Barbara as she used to work very close to here and would go here most days after finishing work and spend a few hours looking over the artwork. After going for so long, Barbara had built up a lovely relationship with the staff, so along with going to see the artwork, Barbara wanted to chat to some of the staff as she was concerned they would be worried about where she had gone. Stuart is new to the Glasgow area, having lived in Manchester most of his life, so he had never been here before but had heard lots of good things about it.

On the day itself, Barbara had a lovely time catching up with the staff in the coffee shop, who even remembered her usual order and Stuart was very impressed by all the taxidermy on display. He has a great love of animals and was able to share some of his knowledge with us. Both of them couldn’t wait to visit again.

To celebrate Chinese new year, Four Hills hosted a variety of themed events around China. We enjoyed some crafting as we made paper lanterns, residents listened to traditional music, and we did virtual tours of Beijing markets and watched all the wonderful, colourful light displays.

The celebrations were rounded off with a lovely traditional Chinese meal provided by our kitchen team. The residents commented it was great to learn about different cultures as Betty said, ‘we are never too old to learn!'