Activities at Cookridge Court Care Home

To spread some hope, happiness and positivity throughout our home and community, Amanda in our activities team came up with the idea of creating a rainbow from love hearts. With social distancing measures in place, our activities team helped the residents paint the hearts with the colours of the rainbow, cut them out and then display them on our front door for all to see. We’ve had lots of lovely compliments from team members and health care professionals coming in to the home and our Head Housekeeper, Anna Hanlon said: “The rainbow really lifts moods as you enter the building, helping you prepare for a pleasant day ahead.”

Cookridge Court have been crowned winners of the Barchester’s annual Easter Cake competition,  the homes chef, Sinead Ruddock won the chef’s category in the regional heats for the North Division!   The annual competition by the hospitality team see’s categories for residents and chefs from all homes each compete to take the accolade.   It was a team effort with chef, Sinead baking the kitchen in the kitchen and once cooled bringing it to Residents to help decorate.   With social distancing measures in  place the home held a small group who interacted and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

Sinead Ruddock & the activity team member’s Amanda Battensby and Tom Potter worked with the residents to create their winning design.    Resident, Jean Harrison really enjoyed herself taking part in the baking and happily shared her love of baking with stories from when she lived at home and how it was lovely bringing back memories to her.   Everyone all had such a wonderful afternoon producing their masterpiece.

During the current climate our team are working hard to ensure our residents’ spirits are kept high. We have been overwhelmed with the support from our community, receiving letters, post cards, pictures and artwork from. The activities team have been working alongside the residents, assisting them with replying to the lovely letters and starting a pen pal scheme within our local community. The pictures and postcard’s and colourful pictures from the children have really brightened up our days. Our residents have loved writing their replies and have even gotten creative with some poetry! Thank you so much, we really are grateful for everyone’s support.  

We had an amazing time celebrating Easter this year by enjoying an eggs-tensive range of activities, from bonnet making, decorating eggs and then relishing in an Easter tea party accompanied by a tipple or two! Residents also tucked in to their delicious Easter nests which they’d spent the afternoon baking themselves. 

As always, we’ve all been looking forward to Easter. It’s such a nice time of the year – the residents love all the colourful Easter eggs and getting creative with their bonnet making. Now more than ever we need to keep spirits high and it really was an eggs-cellent day!

At Cookridge Court, we’re helping to tackle any feelings of isolation during this difficult time. Our teams are helping our residents use iPads, Skype, Facebook and facetime as a way to reach out to families, friends and loved ones.

This has been heart-warming for our residents, bringing smiles and a sense of comfort to them, knowing their families are safe and well. We wanted to make it even more special for the resident’s families and have been emailing photographs with personal messages from each resident to their loved ones. Keeping spirits high is even more important than usual at the moment and our residents’ thoroughly enjoyed working with our activities team to come up with their messages

Taking a trip down memory lane is a great way to help our residents open up and reminisce about happy times. One of our residents, Jean, used to love trips out to Golden Acre Park with her family and so we took advantage of a sunny day and off to Golden Acre Park we went!

We helped Jean and some of her friends here at our home on to the minibus and enjoyed a drive out to the park with a little stop off at the café for some tea and cake. It was lovely to see everybody chatting together about fond memories and all the changes within the park since their first visits.

Outings such as these are very important for everyone who lives here so we’re very lucky to have lots of wonderful places to visit in our surrounding area and look forward to our next trip!