Activities at Moreton Hill Care Home

After 23 years of service at our home our Head Gardener Eddie decided that at the age of 80 it was time to hang up his tools, put his feet up and spend time relaxing with his wife and family. 

It just so happened that Eddie’s leaving day fell on Halloween which gave us a good excuse to dress up and give him a spooky send off.  Everyone is really going to miss Eddie as he is so much a part of our family here.  Fortunately for us though, it won’t be the last we see of him as he has volunteered to come back in the Spring and run some gardening activities for us all.

Once a month during term time, we are lucky enough to have a visit from some of the pupils from Cashes Green school.  We pick the children up in our minibus and bring them to Moreton Hill.  They love coming to the home and meeting our residents. 

We always have a few songs chosen by both the residents and the children that we all sing together and then after refreshments we settle down for games of scrabble, dominoes or jigsaw puzzles.  It’s great to see the generations mixing and enjoying the  others company. 

At Christmas we have been invited to the nativity play at the school.  We can’t wait!!

What a memorable Saturday afternoon it was with musician and composer Susie Vaughan. 

Susie has been running monthly interactive sessions with our residents for some time now and with everyone making such great progress we thought it would be a good idea to have our own concert and invite families and friends to participate. With the help of Susie, everyone played and sang along.

One of our residents, Moira, wrote a piece of music and words to the verses and another resident, Geraint, played the piano to accompany. Music and the pleasure it brings to everyone is an essential part of life here at Moreton Hill and this special session with Susie was certainly a fantastic occasion.

Lucy our Activity Assistant has loads of great ideas and projects for our residents to get stuck into. 

With evenings drawing in and autumn well underway we made some beautiful lanterns with papier-mache tissue paper and decorated with silver stars and glitter.  Battery operated tea lights were placed in the centre of the jars and the lanterns were put on display in our Reception area and given to residents to enjoy in their rooms.

We have a whole list of arts and crafts projects lined up for the coming months and have already started on our poppy display for Remembrance Sunday working with our volunteer artist, Mel to paint poppies on stones that will go on display outside our main entrance.

The Jersey Pack was the sensational new show recently presented to the residents of Moreton Hill by the Tickled Pink Production Company.  Packed with a load of favourite songs from The Rat Pack, Frank Sinatra, Frankie Valli  and the Four Seasons as well as many other classics, this was all tied together with beautiful costumes, wonderful dance routines and a light hearted romantic comedy story. Everyone watching had a fabulous time and joined in with the singing and dancing.  We can’t wait to welcome Tickled Pink back for its Christmas panto and Winter Wonderland concert.

Anyone in the Stroud area knows about the delicious ice creams produced by local company Winstones.  We often take a trip to their shop on Minchinhampton Common but to end summer on a high we decided to invite Lee and his van to come to Moreton Hill so that every resident could have an ice cream.  What a popular and well anticipated occasion! Lee stayed with us for an hour and made sure everyone had an ice cream cone or tub.  With a wide variety of flavours to choose from the salted caramel and mint choc chip proved especially popular.