Finding craft and activities that interest our senior citizens, who have limited capabilities (and these too, vary within a group) is not an easy task.
The craft needs to be simple for aged hands, but not childish.
Quizzes need to relate to their area of knowledge, so again care needs to be taken to make the questions easy enough to be answered by most of the members, but not so easy as to be insulting!
These three activities are amongst the most popular at our Day Centre...(most members aged 80+)
Painting - when I suggested this the response was "But I can't paint!"
However, when I handed out a choice of pre-printed pictures of flowers, churches, teddies, cats or dogs they decided to give it a try. These pictures are easily found on the Internet (Google "Colouring In")
I did offer an alternative of felt tip pens, but everyone chose to paint! The pleasure in painting and the pride in the finished picture was good to see... I printed on 140gsm White Cartridge A4 and we used Acrylic Paints.
Decorative Tiles - endless variations of items can be stuck onto tiles (most garages have half a box of left-over tiles just sitting there!)
For decoration we used flat beads, felt shapes, trimmings (ribbon and ric-rac) and even string. Self-adhesive glitter paper can also be cut into shapes and stuck on. The tile can then be taken home and displayed using double-sided adhesive pads or propped on the mantlepiece...
Quizzes -A favourite (and mentally stimulating for aging minds). The trick is to make the quiz easy enough for most of the members to answer, but not so easy that they feel insulted...
Stick to what they know, especially try to relate to their era. For instance a Movie Quiz will be about movies around the 1950's. (They might well know about the X Factor (!) but it is unlikely that anyone in the group has seen Avatar!)
Above all, generate a feeling of fun, with no pressure on the members to do more than they want, or can manage.
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