Group activity day

As part of the Creative Spaces project, a group activity for young people, care staff and residents was held at Trevarna House, St. Austell on Saturday the 27th March 2010. This activity day was the first in a series of activities and was designed to be fun and engaging in order to "break the ice" for everyone involved in the project.

Two participants with their "pimped" badges

The aims of this activity were:

1. To introduce beneficiaries to each other
2. To begin the process of collecting ideas about the outdoor environment
3. To start the process of raising awareness of dementia
4. To help participants think about how they can make a positive impact in the project

We achieved this through:

1. Creating opportunities for conversation
2. Providing activities that allowed participants to be creative and to support each other to achieve an end result
3. Designing small working groups so that the young people had direct contact with a resident and the opportunity to increase their experience and knowledge of dementia
4. Gaining feedback at the end of the session

Seven young people came and were accompanied by either a parent or teacher. Five residents joined in the fun and three care staff were on hand to assist and participate. We were also joined by Angie MacDonald, a landscape design research student who will be following the project as part of her studies. The session was hosted by two members of the Sensory Trust; Wendy Brewin and Victoria Hutchinson.

Before people arrived, the dining space was brightened up with tablecloths (wipeable, for craft activities), bunches of flowers, images of outdoor spaces, and the tables laid out with the materials required for the activities.

Four small working groups were put together; each group consisting of one or two young people and a resident. Care staff and Sensory Trust staff then moved between tables assisting where required.

The Activities

Pimp My Badge!

The first activity was designed to engage young and old in conversation together whilst individualising their project name badges. Each person involved in Creative Spaces will be provided with a lanyard and name badge so that they become easily recognised as being part of Creative Spaces when in the care home. The young people assisted residents with decorating their name badges but were careful not to impress their own ideas/designs on to the residents; helping them by suggesting colours, materials and textures that they could use.

Residents interacted with the young people, asking them what to do with their badges, asking their names and chatting about the activity. Conversations also took place about what school the children went to; whether the ‘game’ was difficult or not and how much enjoyment people got from it.

For the purpose of helping the young people gain some experience of dementia and to begin to create opportunities for conversation, this was a very useful activity. Decorating the badges required the young people and care workers to provide some assistance to the residents but the decorated badges were felt to be joint efforts by everyone. Most of the time, the residents were able to make their own choices about what decorations they wanted on their badges. There were odd occasions when a question received a programmed response but these were far and few between. Our aim is to get the participants to use questions that offer a choice and that will help to further explore people’s experiences of outdoor environments and social interaction.  

Memory Postcards

The purpose of the second activity was  to discover what elements of outdoor spaces and of being outdoors were strong enough to be retained in individual’s memories; those elements that act as ‘connectors’ in our minds between people and places. 

Each person in the groups was provided with a blank piece of card, roughly 35cms x 10cms. On one side of the card was glued a folded piece of paper.

Using images, words and Widgits (pictorial symbols) people portrayed a memory that they had of being outdoors on the blank side of the card.  They then wrote their memory inside the folded paper on the back. It was up to others then to try and guess what the memory was; once they had, or if they couldn’t, they could look on the back to discover what it the memory was. People then swapped their cards with someone else; each person gave and received a postcard which would help them to remember the person that the memory belonged to and would help to begin to pull out ideas that may eventually feed into the design of the outdoor spaces at Trevarna. 

One or two of the residents selected images that they liked rather than ones that represented a particular memory. This was also useful as these too represented elements of outdoors that were popular with them and represented outdoor environments and features that they enjoyed; for example woodlands, bluebells and children playing.

Young people and Angie MacDonald working on their Memory Postcards

Again, this activity helped to engage people in conversation. The young people helped the residents to find images that represented places, emotions or activities and in some cases wrote the text on the back as dictated to them by the resident.

Outcomes

Overall there was a very positive response to the day.

The first group activity session went extremely well. Working together to complete the tasks engendered a lot of respect between the young people and the residents. The young people had previously attended a dementia awareness workshop run by Sensory Trust and the manager of Trevarna and were able to put what they had learned into practice.

Conversation ebbed and flowed but on the whole was very positive, casual and based on the activities and what people liked about outdoor environments.

Feedback forms were provided for everyone to complete. Care staff and young people were asked to write down the words of the residents as they were spoken and not to interpret them in any way.

The young people found it useful to meet and spend time with the residents, to see Trevarna care home and the outdoor environment for the first time.

Both activities were popular and engaging. The most popular one being ‘Pimp My Badge!’ .

The young people all learned one thing about someone else.  For example:

• “R likes through the woods”
• “R likes glitter and feathers”
• “B likes cats and nature. She’s a good cook”
• “D lived in Brighton and enjoyed her garden”
• “they behave to suit the resident that they look after”

They were invited to provide suggestions for potential future activities and these included:

• “Go and see woodlands and animals, birds, rabbits, water” (resident)
• “making models” (resident)
• “flower arranging or planting in the garden” (young person)

This activity day was a very successful step towards the project's goals of reconnecting older people with dementia with their community and with their surrounding environment.

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