Recycle these as an activity!
Activities in our facilities fall into three categories, supportive, maintenance, and empowerment. Supportive activities require staff or volunteer support for the member or resident to participate in. Maintenance activities help a resident maintain their physical and cognitive abilities as well as their sense of socializing, spirituality, and emotional health. Empowerment activities help the resident re-develop a sense of purpose in their own life. Often, these involve self-expression, personal responsibility, and/or self-respect.
When working with the dementia population, most of our activities fall into the supportive and maintenance categories. It is for good reason, that particular population has an inevitable decline in most cases, and we’re trying to prolong, or plateau, their lives with therapeutic recreation. Sadly, the person with dementia loses out on empowerment opportunities in our facilities because we’ve been so focused on helping them maintain what abilities they still have. We must never forget, that the person with dementia is still a person who is conscious of themself, and therefore needs opportunities of empowerment that help maintain their sense of dignity and self-respect.
This brings us to the activity I led this morning with our dementia group. One of our staff is on leave to be with one of her family members with a serious illness. I wanted to give our members an opportunity to help (because they’re going to notice our staff is gone!) and I thought that making “Get Well Soon” cards would be a nice way to get them involved. Right away, this activity is empowering all of our members by giving them the opportunity for self-expression and the responsibility to help cheer someone up.
I got together some various colors of construction paper. Usually, our staff gets all the materials together ahead of time. This time, however, I wanted to try involving our clients even more (I was inspired by some of our discussions in the MEPAP 2nd. Ed. course!). It was an hour before our group activity was scheduled to begin, and some of our members were drinking coffee together at a table. I asked them if they could fold the construction paper to help me get ready for the craft. I was quite pleased because one lady who really doesn’t enjoy card or dice games was very eager to help in this manner. One of our male members also brought forth an idea. He asked if he could cut the paper into different shapes so we could have different sizes and shaped cards. Wow, I did not expect this! He was a tool guy throughout his life, so we quickly brought out some tools for this task, a ruler, pencil, and scissors (yes, real adult scissors!).
As the group was working on the paper, I brought out a stack of donated cards that we have in storage. Some of them were for birthday occasions, some were holiday cards, and others were for any occasion. I asked the group to cut out pictures they thought were appropriate from these cards to be glued onto the construction paper. Also, I told them we were helping the environment because we were recycling old greeting cards. If you’re looking for places to get used greeting cards try asking a local church or elementry school to hold a ‘card drive.’ This works especially well around and after the winter holidays when everybody has a zillion greeting cards they don’t know what to do with anymore!
So, our group was buzzing with activity, and the best part was that the “real” activity hadn’t even begun yet! Instead of our staff spending one to two hours working to get this together, we extended the opportunity to our clients and we both benefitted! They have something worthwhile and rewarding to work on, and our staff will get burned out less.
We spent about 45 minutes prepping the activity, and I gave them a 15 minute break to wash up or use the restroom before our Card Shoppe would begin. Also, this gave our other members who planned to arrive at the scheduled time a chance to show up and chat without being distracted or feeling like they were left out. One of our volunteers was about to clear the rulers, pencils, and glue from our male client’s seat, but I said, “Oh no! He’s a tool guy, let’s let him keep his tools!”
The activity began, and this male member wanted to keep helping out. He passed out construction paper around the room and asked what color each person preferred. I could tell he was glowing inside. To us, this may seem like a trivial task, but to him, the opportunity to be a leader in passing out the paper was the highlight of his day.
After a half an hour of working on the cards (we also brought out stickers and shapes they could glue on) I asked everyone to make sure they signed their names. We then held an art show and everyone had a chance to display their work to the group, with applause in between.
I cannot overstate how many times we’ve held a card shoppe activity, and missed out on this great opportunity to empower our folks. And in reality, its not us who were missing out, but those who we are responsible to care after.
- Justin Zarb, ADPC
Image by: Richard Moross (Flickr)
