Activities at Kirkburn Court Care Home

Staff and residents have had great fun recently celebrating Halloween. We donned our witches hats to take part in a few spooky themed games and ate our way through lots of sweet treats! Our game of 'find the spider' was a great hit, whereby we had a competition to see who could pick out the most spiders from the bowl of rice in 30 seconds. Of course, there were a few eyeballs in there too (all plastic of course!). We also tried our hand at pin the hat on the cat, but we suspect there was some peaking going on with this one! Finally, we rounded off with a game of pass the pumpkin, with the winner receiving some beastie prizes! Great fun was had by all and some residents even suggested that the staff could try and make their way home on the broomsticks!

We celebrated Remembrance Day with English National Ballet Associate Dance Artist, Richard Bermange, who led a creative dance workshop for our residents followed by a special extract of Akram Khan’s work Dust, premiered in 2014 as part of ENB’s Lest We Forget programme, commemorating the First World War.

ENB company dancers, Erina Takahashi and James Streeter performed the extract and provided some insight into this moving work.

Our residents had a wonderful time as they listened, danced and were able to singalong to famous war time music performed by ENB Associate Musician, Matt Hartley-Stevens.

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.

Our Mystery Bus Trips have continued during October and our residents have enjoyed touring around various locations and taking in the lovely scenery of the Buchan area. As the weather has turned a bit chillier now, our bus is fully prepped with all the essentials – blankets, hand muffs and warm drinks with cake! Our residents have continued to throughly enjoy visiting many local landmarks that they remember and subsequently sharing some lovely stories and memories. 

During October, we have continued our link up with a local organisation called Wild Things, who have kindly been sending us some craft and nature resources to use. Our residents have made wooden coasters using some pressed flowers which we collected a few weeks ago. There were some lovely personalised designs created and they have certainly brightened up the residents rooms. We have also tried our hand at planting some seeds. We have parsley, coriander, broad beans and chives. Many of our green fingered residents expertly prepared the pots, soil and seeds and shared quite a few gardening tips along the way. We also discussed the various recipes that we could use our produce in!

As part of our World Food Day activities in October, we dropped off some donations to our local Foodbank in Peterhead. Our resident, Sandy, was delighted to present the staff with our donations on behalf of all our staff and residents. Over the last 18 months, we have been shown some amazing generosity by our local community, so we were delighted in turn to support such a great community facility who do a fantastic job! We also had great fun during a touch test game of guess the food. Great hilarity ensued as residents put their hand in our ‘Feely Tub’ to see if they could guess the food item!