Gigi

Nuses Week:
May 6-12
Skilled Nursing Care Week:
May 9-15
Any ideas?

I am a new director and am trying to brainstorm some innovative ideas. As a TRD I just focused on my activities but am looking for some new "bigger" ideas that involve all and don't require big groups.
Any ideas out there for Nurses week May 6-May 12 and Skilled Nursing Care Week May 9-May 15???

I think the challenge here is to do no contact activities with COVID restrictions. If you play cards or dice games you need to wipe down everything as soon as someone touches them and definitely cannot pass around to other residents!
Music therapy is huge in our memory care unit, use an ipad that only you touch, find pandora or amazon music and search 40's or 50's music, play part of the song and let them try to guess what song it is.
This or that? game.
Dry erase board for words-in-words game, Pictionary, hangman.
Use laptop for youtube clips of funny animals.
Reminisce 1:1 about favorite holiday, best pet ever, etc.
Finish the phrase- on golden carers website
A-Z like scattergories: name something that starts with B that you find at the beach; starts with the letter C that you find in the garden, etc.
There are a lot of things on Goldencarers- Alzheimer's category, Activity Connection website, and on Pinterest.

Snowman is my theme for January. You can buy Styrofoam balls at Michaels, I put them in a cylinder vase w/ snow on bottom, they sell buy the bag at michaels.

you are allowed to have gatherings? And candles?
Where are you?

We have students that are not in school now write cards to the residents.
We also have churches that bring clothes.

I have been in your shoes.
I think someone already touched on this but I take the "we go around the table clockwise so each person can answer" approach. I used to play the 'make small words out of a big word' and I had "Al" who walked into a room and just blurted out all the words. They were to write down all the words they could think of for 10 minutes.
I actually ended up asking him to assist another resident that usually struggled with this game. It gave him "purpose".

I'm taking this as a no.

My TRDs and I made DIY carnations, you can find on pinterest.
Fan fold 8 sheets of square tissue paper, we used 6 pink and 2 white for the inner part.
staple in the center and pull apart each sheet to form a flower. We had some multi-colored pipe cleaners for the stem-glued. made small 'card's made from stock paper cut out with scalloped scissors, 1 hole punch to slip the pipe cleaner thru- twirled the 'stem' around a finger to curl. We wrote happy mother's day and drew a small flower on the card. Finished it with ribbon. And bringing a small individually wrapped chocolate.
We are also face-timing family.

BIG QUESTION-For those of you that have POSITIVE COVID-19 Residents:
Are you doing room-to-room activities with them.... As in physically donning PPE and going to the rooms?