Activities at Kernow House Care Home
Our Activities Coordinators organise varied and regular events. The activities that take place depend on what our residents tell us they are interested in and the feedback we get from their families. We currently have pop-up cafes where we socialise and maybe visit the hairdresser. We have regular live music events, a storyteller and visits from animals and we are often joined by families or friends during our social activities where they are always most welcome.
Living in Cornwall the surrounding countryside offers many beauty spots and we often have trips out to wherever our residents would like to go. At other times a walk to nearby shops or cafes is what we enjoy.
Louise is our hairdresser and she is with us twice a week. Louise also supports us during our weekly Namaste sessions where she offers hand massages in a relaxing environment. Every Thursday afternoon we have a time of worship supported by our local community. Our ice cream van, Kernow Kones, and our mobile pub, Kernow Keg, also make a weekly appearance. We have monthly clubs, when we play bingo or watch a film in our pop-up cinema. Residents on all units are invited to take part in a monthly Resident’s Meeting and they tell us what they would like.
Apart from these regular events, we also celebrate special occasions and often have musical entertainers to visit but we also make our own fun. All staff take part in fancy dress or charity events that we support and often what we do evolves through interaction between residents and care or activity staff. All this makes Kernow House a vibrant place to be where things happen both as group activities as well as on an individual level.
Bea Porup
Bea has many years of experience working in elderly care and both experience and training in dementia care. She has also worked extensively with people with Huntington's disease. Bea works closely with Sue, Jackie and our management team, nurses, carers and kitchen team to ensure our home has a vibrant environment with lots of events happening and varied opportunities for having both new and familiar experiences, making sure the people living here lead a rich and fulfilling life.
Read our brochure 'Life-enriching activities' for more information about life in our care homes.
Read our brochure
Activities and Events Partnerships
As part of our bespoke life-enrichment programmes, we host a number of live virtual events in the home on a regular basis through a number of partnerships with places of interest and world class performance companies
Life at Kernow House Care Home
Will Keating and Harry Glasson
On International Day of Happiness we enjoyed an afternoon of great live music when Will Keating and Harry Glasson came to perform.
Ian, who lives at Kernow House, went to school with Harry Glasson and has known him for years. In later life they wrote three songs together. Ian wrote the music and Harry wrote the words. A relative originally suggested we should book them for a performance and it was a great success.
Residents joined in with the singing, and we had a fantastic time listening to both Will and Harry play guitar and sing Cornish Songs. Will Keating is well known for singing ‘This Is My Cornwall’, which Harry Glasson wrote and we all sang along.
Creative Mojo
We have taken part in Nutrition and Hydration Week and have enjoyed lots of tasty treats and learned a lot but we have also had some fun making a collage. This is one of the kits we buy from Creative Mojo Ltd and we have chatted about what our favourite food and drinks are. The no 1 and all time winner has to be a good cup of tea! Many residents enjoy doing crafts and with the kits from Creative Mojo, we are able to make some impressive displays.
Baking cake
It’s competition time at Kernow House. Barchester Healthcare have an Easter Cake Competition for all the homes in the company and we have been busy making our own cake. Residents chose a chocolate cake, so we followed Mary Berry’s chocolate cake recipe and decorated it with even more chocolate. There are some great cooks amongst the residents. We have entered our cake into Barchester’s Easter Cake competition and are waiting to find out if we have won. We enjoy a good competition and always take part.
Engaging with the community
We were invited to the grand opening of the new Inclusive Community Park Made-Well CIC. Barchester's Charitable Foundation gave a grant of £5000 which was spent on wheelchair accessible equipment and outdoor gym equipment. A resident from Kernow House tried it all and had such a good time, that she has come back and told everyone about it. We attended the ribbon cutting ceremony and even had a lovely cream tea. The weather was kind and when a rainbow came out, it made for just about a perfect afternoon. It’s great working with the communities around us.
Creature Feature
We had a great visit from Creature Feature. This time they brought the much loved rabbit, Marble, George, the guinea pig, Evie, the bearded dragon and a first for us, a blue tongued skink, who hasn’t been named yet. We could hold and pet the animals and were told lots of interesting facts. Residents tell us they like to see live animals and this was a great visit with some unusual animal encounters.
Pancake Day
What a lot of fun we had on Shrove Tuesday. We made pancakes throughout the entire home, with residents whipping up the mix and we had all the traditional toppings. Sugar and lemon was the favourite closely followed by maple syrup and banana. We also had a pancake, made of material, which we tossed. At one point, there was a little too much smoke but we are proud to say, we only set the fire alarm off once.
