Activities at Wood Grange Care Home

Across our services, our residents were treated to a special virtual sensory storytelling session.  Together with Art Historian Jon Sleigh and the Historic Royal Palaces community team, we explored several royal palaces through the theme of food, dining and celebration!

We enjoyed a fantastic taste-a-long experience from the comfort of our home, from Tudor treats to Stuart sweets. A lovely time was had by all.

Across our services we had a lovely time joining Mark Piesing for an exciting virtual event to discuss his book ‘N-4 Down: The Hunt for The Arctic Airship Italia’.

Our residents were thrilled to find out more about the book and the fascinating story of the world-famous exploring airship Italia, returning from the North Pole on May 24, 1928. The airship was struck by a terrible storm and crashed somewhere over the Arctic ice, triggering the largest polar rescue mission in history.

The virtual book club experience was truly enjoyed by all.

We love birthdays at Wood Grange, we celebrated Anne’s birthday in style.  Anne enjoyed a day spent with her family, receiving flowers, cards, gifts and enjoying this beautiful cake made by the kitchen team.

Our resident sat with her husband enjoying a romantic meal together for Valentine’s day, we had John Dalton playing his harp in the background to create a romantic atmosphere. John was fantastic and our residents really enjoyed hearing him play.

One of our residents enjoying exercise using our new parachute, this is a great activity to get our residents moving their arms. Physical exercise is great for our residents to avoid stiffness in the joints, it is also great to get the residents together for social interaction. But most importantly, it is great fun!

Staff and residents at Wood Grange are celebrating because their much-loved head chef, Radovan Smalo, has graduated from Barchester’s Chef Academy in the Class of 2022. The Academy is run by Barchester’s Hospitality Development and Standards Manager, Mervyn Knights, and helps chefs to both hone their skills and learn new ones, covering many different modules including cooking for residents living with dementia, budgeting, balancing flavours, minimising wastage, presentation skills and so much more.

Radovan started cooking in 2010 and worked his way up through the ranks from kitchen assistant.  He joined Barchester in 2019 as head chef at Wood Grange and he has never looked back.  He absolutely loves his job at Wood Grange where he finds the hours much more sociable than other chef positions.  He likes to chat to his residents to find out their likes and dislikes so he can present their food exactly the way they like it.  He loves to come up with new ways to surprise and delight his residents with nutritious and flavoursome home-cooked meals.