LORRAINE

Our dementia residents love singalong I take my ukulele or guitar. Made up books so the residents can sing along too. I'm not the flashiest uke or guitar player but as long as they are enjoying it so what?

Very lucky that our cooks provide the cakes. Our residents do cream, icing, sprinkles, banana, we do the activity around the dining table and incorporate it with morning tea all residents wear gloves and we share the cakes with everyone in our dementia unit.

Some ideas : I use USB sticks and the Internet . There are stacks of aquariums that you are able to download off youtube which I run on the tv while playing music either on the movie or just a CD player. The residents enjoy watching the fish. You can also have a log fire burning on the screen, beach scenes, all sorts. I also run photo albums on the screen featuring the residents doing their activities, posters of old movies, photos of old movie stars, there's stacks of things - the hardest part is finding the time to get it all downloaded and set up. Worth it though as lots of chat comes from it.

This is my latest program for our dementia unit *** see downloads ***. All residents have a copy in their rooms and an A3 size is also displayed in the main living areas. I try to make it visually interesting. Hope it helps. I'm lucky i have good team support as i am fairly new to RAO and have not done the course as yet.

Our facility has used the WII but we find the residents really struggle to use it, they just don't have the ability to operate the controls. We are considering getting an XBox kinect as they can use their whole body to participate.