[Kyprogrammers] nursing home programs

[hawesville3 at bellsouth.net]

I would like to know what kinds of things you all do when you visit the nursing homes.  Do you use the material in the bi-folkal kits that are available?  Do you have different groups come in and talk/present something to them? Our budget does not allow for that to much at all.

I have only been doing this a couple of months and I am having a hard time coming up with things to do.  I go out to a nursing home twice a month, all of the residents that come are in wheel chairs and a couple have limited hand dexterity.  What I have been doing is using some of the events within the month to create activities.  I have only looked at a couple of bi-folkal kits and I think they were the mini-kits, and I found that some of the worksheets in them would be a little hard for the ones that attend with me to do.  I have scheduled some full ones for the months to come.

One of the things that I came up with was a music bingo, I down-loaded some older/classic songs to a CD. (You are my Sunshine, On Top of Old Smoky etc.)
then I went to www.dltk-kids.com bingo card maker , then what I did was play a little bit of the song and if they had it they got to mark it.  They seemed to like it a lot, but I don't want to do that every time I go.  We have done a couple of crafts but it is difficult to come up with very, very simple ones that don't look to childish.

I am only out there for an hour.  I try to find some story to read to them, I have used the Chicken Soup for Soul books.  

So if anyone else could let me know how there program runs or have any suggestions on short story reading material or any good web-sites for activities to do with the elderly I would very much appericiate it.  I am getting very discouraged. 

Thanks for any help you give.

Lona Kratzer
HCPL Branch Manager
hcplbranch at hcplky.org
hcplky.org
-------------- next part --------------
Skipped content of type multipart/related