Activities at Four Hills Care Home

Residents at Four Hills have been enjoying weekly trips to our local Dementia Musical Memories group based at Springburn church, these are always great events, where residents get to socialise with members of the community and other care homes.

Singing is always a great way to create happy memories and there is always lots of great chat, residents sing songs that are familiar to them, play musical instruments and chat over a cuppa and a cake.

Margaret said she does not normally like going out but this is one outing that she would be keen to attend again.  

This was another request from our wish tree from the two Margaret’s who have made great friends since coming to live at Four Hills.
Margaret said the one things she would love to do is visit our local pub and enjoy a meal out together, she felt this allowed them to still do things they would have done with their families.

The two Margaret were joined on the outing with one of our new residents May who we are keen to build friendships together as we feel these ladies have lots in common and just need a wee helping hand for them to get to know each other.

The ladies had a fabulous time, chatting over a glass of wine, or a pint of lager in May’s case, May said her fish and chips was the nicest she had in years and can’t believe she still has the opportunity to do these things while living in a care home she never thought these things could be possible, she hasn’t done anything like this for a long time as she had been confined to the house for a long time.  

May said she feels like since she has come to Four Hills it has given her a new lease of life.

Summer is here to stay and what better way to enjoy it than with a day at the beach? Residents choose this outing to go further afield. Douglas suggested that we go to Portobello beach or Portie, as he calls it, as he had spent a lot of his younger years here and would take his girls here as children, so the place holds lots of special memories for him, and he wanted to see if the place had changed any.

He was joined on the outing by 3 other residents who equally enjoyed strolling along the promenade, stopping off for the traditional fish and chips, and watching everyone play, swim and chat with other visitors while we ate our ice-creams.

Helen said it was one of her best days in a long time and how much she loved just being able to sit and relax while watching the world go by, and it didn’t feel like she lived in a care home, but instead she was enjoying a day out with friends.

This month residents chose a Country & Western theme for our monthly themed day. The home was decorated with flags and bunting, the chef prepared a special themed menu for the day.

In the morning, we celebrated with games and a quiz followed by an afternoon hoe down with live entertainment from the lovely Malcolm singing all our favourite Country & Western classics. We even tried our hands at some line dancing, which gave us lots of laughs.

It was great to see residents, staff and family members join us for such a fun day.   

Here at Four Hills, over the last couple of months, residents and staff have made a big joint effort to improve our gardens, with lots of new sensory plants, bringing lots of new smells and colours to our garden. Residents have been spending a lot of time out in the garden tending to the plants.

David has been a great help doing all the watering of the garden. This gives him a great sense of purpose, and he has really enjoyed helping and seeing our garden flourish for all our residents and families to enjoy a nice, relaxing place to use when they visit. Residents have also been making little touches to add to our garden. We have had some lovely stone painting sessions which we plan to make a feature of in the garden. 

Residents at Four Hills were treated to a bread-making masterclass from our Head Chef Richard. He showed us how to make lots of different breads including garlic & chive, curry loaf which our residents have never tried before and traditional bread rolls, residents were keen to share baking tips with each other and this sparked lots of lovely conversations between residents and Richard. 

Gertrude agreed that all breads were delicious and was keen for the chef to do other demonstrations with them. Richard has agreed to make this a monthly feature with next month’s masterclass being on pizza making.  

With a packed lunch especially prepared by the home's hospitality team, we headed down the coast to enjoy a day trip to Largs where we were met by Jean’s daughter and son-in-law, who were visiting the area.

Jean said, “it was fantastic that she got to create some new happy memories with her family”.  We enjoyed a walk along the sea-front with the breeze in our hair before watching the boats whilst enjoying an ice-cream.

We had a wonderful day, sharing stories about our seaside and trips over the years with our families.

As part of life here at Four Hills, we have a wishing tree where residents can place suggestions for different outings or activities that are special to them. This is one of our wishes from our tree.

Helen and May have made great friends with each other since coming to live at Four Hills and thought it would be a lovely idea if they could both do something together.

Both ladies came up with the idea of going shopping and stopping off for a spot of lunch together, so that’s what we did. It was because of our travels to our local retail park. May wanted to go to Matalan for some new tops and Helen wanted to go to Home Bargains as the staff always talk about the great buys and that was true for Helen, who left with a basket full of things for her room, new photo frames and Nik knack’s to make her feel right at home.

The ladies said this had made their week and how fantastic it was doing things that they would do at home and being able to do it together. There were lots of laughs and stories told on our trip in the bus.
The ladies are already planning their next trip together.

Residents are loving our new gardening club, which we have been having weekly since the start of March. We are using our whole-home approach in this project, with our gardening, admin, kitchen and activity teams involved.

Residents have been actively involved in the planning, deciding they want to do lots of things from scratch, what type of plants to grow and what vegetables we would like to start growing after a visit to our local garden centre to see what is in season. 

The first choices were sunflowers, and we tried our hands at green beans and courgettes. Residents love watching the seedlings grow in their bedrooms.

The residents at Four Hills had a fabulous time celebrating St Patrick’s Day. The place was decked out in green, white and gold. In the morning, we enjoyed a virtual tour of Dublin, followed by an Irish-themed quiz.

In the afternoon, we were treated to some Irish classics by our visiting entertainer Angela as we swooned along, tapping our toes, while we enjoyed a few glasses of Guinness and some lovely Irish Whisky kindly donated to us by one of our relatives. 

Everyone commented on what a wonderful time they had socialising together and having lots of fun.

Getting out and about in our community, going to our favourite places is big on our list of priorities here at Four Hills.

We have our wishing tree, where residents can leave comments on places they would like to go. Stuart and Barbara both wanted to go to The Kelvingrove Art Galleries. This is a very special place for Barbara as she used to work very close to here and would go here most days after finishing work and spend a few hours looking over the artwork. After going for so long, Barbara had built up a lovely relationship with the staff, so along with going to see the artwork, Barbara wanted to chat to some of the staff as she was concerned they would be worried about where she had gone. Stuart is new to the Glasgow area, having lived in Manchester most of his life, so he had never been here before but had heard lots of good things about it.

On the day itself, Barbara had a lovely time catching up with the staff in the coffee shop, who even remembered her usual order and Stuart was very impressed by all the taxidermy on display. He has a great love of animals and was able to share some of his knowledge with us. Both of them couldn’t wait to visit again.

To celebrate Chinese new year, Four Hills hosted a variety of themed events around China. We enjoyed some crafting as we made paper lanterns, residents listened to traditional music, and we did virtual tours of Beijing markets and watched all the wonderful, colourful light displays.

The celebrations were rounded off with a lovely traditional Chinese meal provided by our kitchen team. The residents commented it was great to learn about different cultures as Betty said, ‘we are never too old to learn!'

Residents at Four Hills had a wonderful Valentine’s week with many themed activities around love. Firstly, we started with an arts & crafts session, making cards for our loved ones, then we had a reminiscing session talking about how we would have spent the day when we were younger and residents shared with us some of the traditional poems they would write. We had some great laughs with that one.

Then it was on to the day itself where we invited our family members to join us for afternoon tea. It was great to see the residents celebrate their love together. Then, to round off the celebrations, we had some live entertainment from singer, Angela, who treated us to some of our favourite love songs as residents sang and danced along. 

Margaret commented on how lovely it was to spend the special day with her husband.

New Year's celebrations continued into New Year’s Day when we welcomed David – a piper, into our home to play some familiar traditional Scottish songs whilst we danced and sang-a-long too!

We even raised a glass of wee dram to toast the new year, and we shared memories of time gone by. It was a wonderful way to spend the day.

From everyone here at Four Hills, we wish you a very happy and healthy 2025.
 

What a wonderful afternoon trip out for the two Bettys to our local Dobbie’s Garden Centre, one of our favourite places to visit.

Our ladies loved seeing all the colourful and bright festive decorations and displays, and remarked on the vast selection and variety. Then it was off to their coffee shop for delicious tea and cakes before returning home.