Activities at Crabwall Hall Care Home
Activities are an integral part of life at our care home. We want to ensure that the people we support have as much fun as possible during their time with us, so it’s important that our activities programme is created with the interests of residents in mind. Our skilled Activities Coordinators bring a certain uniqueness to the home that can’t be found anywhere else, and which is reflected in the activities they organise.
Jacqui Cameron
We all know that keeping active is important. We have created a wonderful culture within the home and we work together to give residents the best possible experience. We are here to ensure that residents enjoy an environment that is both stimulating and socially active. We ensure the team knows each residents' preferences, so that we can deliver a person-centered program of events and activities. Essential to our homely feel is the strong relationships of trust we build with residents and their families and friends. The home also has its very own minibus for our numerous outings for coffee and shopping, which residents love.
Read our brochure 'Life-enriching activities' for more information about life in our care homes.
Read our brochure
Activities and Events Partnerships
As part of our bespoke life-enrichment programmes, we host a number of live virtual events in the home on a regular basis through a number of partnerships with places of interest and world class performance companies
Life at Crabwall Hall Care Home
Month of memories
The Activity team at Crabwall Hall care home in Mollington, Chester recently launched “Month of Memories” to run throughout October. The idea was to combine the wonderfully interesting, historical memories of their residents, with the modern way of sharing, a video message on the social media platform of Facebook.
All Barchester homes have their own Facebook page and regular stories are shared each week. For the month of October residents at Crabwall Hall were invited to make a short video message of a special memory they have, that they thought may be interesting to younger generations.
Carolyn Minchew, Head of Activities at Crabwall Hall said: “One of the most pleasurable parts of my job is listening to our residents’ wonderful stories of their lives at home and work, with family and their personal experience of WWII. Today we share all aspects of our lives via social media, and I thought it would be a great idea to share these fascinating accounts by way of short video messages. The videos reached more than 1500 people over the month which was wonderful”
Vegetarian for life demo
We had a lovely time joining Chef Alex Connell from Vegetarian for Life for a Halloween-inspired virtual cooking demo.
Alex demonstrated how to prepare a few themed dishes, such as root vegetable tagine, roasted butternut squash mac-n-cheese, chocolate pots with piped biscuits and flapjacks.
Our residents were delighted to be a part of this lovely virtual culinary session by tasting the vegetarian dishes from the comfort of our home.
Movie night
Residents at Crabwall Manor enjoy their regular and popular movie nights in the homes comfy lounge. Each month the homes is re-arranged to resemble a movie theatre, with closed curtains and popcorn and wine served as they settled to watch their chosen film, this month it was blockbuster “Titanic”. Many of the residents watching knew the story of the fatal Atlantic maiden voyage, but few had ever seen the film.
It was a lovely evening and thoroughly enjoyed by all.
Guest singer performs for residents
This month we had one of our most popular activities which was to welcome a singing performer into Crabwall. Mal Coote has been a firm favourite for a number of years and residents always enjoy his engaging banter and selection of well-known songs they can sing and clap along to.
Mal sings many familiar tunes from the 1950’s and 1960’s for his hour long performance whilst playing guitar.
World card making day
To mark World Card Making Day today, a small group of residents gathered in our bright sunny garden lounge at Crabwall Hall and got creative with pens, pencils, colourful stickers and crayons to create a beautiful personal card for their loved ones. Our activity co-ordinator Carolyn drew some flower outlines for some to colour in. Sheila and Jean used colourful stickers and Christine and Howard drew pretty designs free hand. Pat personalised her card further for son Paul by using stickers on the front.
It’s so important to have a wide variety of activities available to residents and getting creative like this is a great way of encouraging imagination, creativity and close eye and hand co-ordination, as well as encouraging and praising each other on the final results.
They then wrote personal loving messages inside and presented them to their loved ones of their next visit.
A lesson in creative writing
We had a great time joining journalist and novelist, Mike Gayle, for an intriguing virtual interview, during which he shared top tips for creative writing with our residents and read passages from his latest book, All the Lonely People.
We were thrilled to find out about Mike’s background, to understand what led him to become a writer and his creative process.
It was a lovely talk, enjoyed by all, especially by our keen writers at the home.
