Activities at South Grange Care Home

We had a brilliant time across our services with Harrogate Skills 4 Living as they took us on a wonderful virtual visit to their Harrogate Chocolate Factory.

Residents were thrilled to discover details about the chocolate-making process and the fascinating journey from bean to bar, all while enjoying some delicious sweet treats.

The Factory aims to employ people with learning disabilities and autism, involving them in all parts of the process, from sorting and roasting the beans to packaging and sales. The experience was truly enjoyed by all who joined this event.

We continue to celebrate a varied life enrichment programme and across our services we linked up with other Barchester care homes and hospitals up and down the country for some interactive Beat the Clock games.  

Our residents truly enjoyed solving word puzzles, conundrums and mathematical problems as part of Barchester’s very own game show series.

Everyone who joined had a fantastic time and enjoyed some friendly competition.

Residents and staff at South Grange celebrated all things Irish for St Patrick’s Day this week. The home was decorated with shamrocks and everyone dressed in green to mark the day.

Staff, residents and their family and friends at the home marked the day by getting our dancing shoes on and welcoming Gus Zee who gave us an afternoon of Irish gigs. Residents and their families had a great time getting dressed up as leprechauns with our shamrock glasses and having our photos taken with our St, Patricks Day backdrop.

Resident Margaret said: “It has been a lovely day. I really enjoyed myself being up dancing to the Irish gigs and the atmosphere was really good”.  A lovely afternoon had my all!

Residents had a lovely afternoon welcoming back the Steeple Church, Dundee who spent the afternoon providing hymns for us to sing and conducting a lovely church service for Easter.

The church also provided the live music to sing with the hymns. We had a guitarist, recorder player and a violinist. This makes the residents feel like they are in an actual church and brings a fantastic atmosphere to the room.

Minister Douglas not only delivered our beautiful readings and prayers for the service but also paid a visit to individuals in their rooms who couldn’t be there for the service.  Resident Frances, who attended the Steeple Church and choir before moving into South Grange, said “it was so nice to see some old friends from the church again and be able to chat to them after the service”.

Our residents and staff took part in this year’s Nutrition and Hydration Week.

Throughout the week, we focused on fun-filled educational activities on the value of food and drink in maintaining health and wellbeing, sensory and tasting sessions.

We started the week off by making Knickerbocker Glory’s with our own twist. We used fresh fruit such as strawberries, bananas and raspberries, not forgetting the sauce, wafer and sprinkles for decoration too. Everyone agreed they looked amazing but tasted even better.

The fun didn’t stop there, during the week we had a variety of fruit platters, cheese boards and smoothie making which everyone was delighted with. Alongside a discussion of what our favourite meal is.

To end the week we had a morning of tasting a variety of teas. We had flavours such as peppermint, English breakfast, lemon & ginger, green and strawberry & raspberry. This wasn’t to everyone’s liking but we all had a go to give our verdict on which was the best one. In the end everyone agreed a good old Tetley’s tea bag did the job.

Residents were over the moon to have another visit from our little friends from the Grange Nursery. The children were happy to share the delicious biscuits they had been making for us and enjoyed spending world book day reading their favourite book ‘why is there an elephant in my fridge’.

The children had great fun using our elephant props that everyone helped make in previous weeks. Residents chatted about how grateful they were to see all their infectious smiles regularly and the happiness that the children bring.