Activities at Tennyson Wharf Care Home

The staff at Ashminster house enjoyed a pleasant variety of delicious sweet treats such as jam-filled doughnuts and a black forest cake, as well as refreshing cold drinks made and prepared by our lovely chef, Cris, as a thank you for all their hard work and tireless dedication over the festive period for our residents and their families.

The residents took a fun and deep look back on three fun stories from the past.

From the ever popular Charles Dickens novel 'A Christmas Carol', to the fun kid's story of 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas', watching the classic animated film while they enjoyed tea and a mince pie.

Saturday afternoon at Ashminster House gets very competitive with friends and family having a scrabble battle. 

This game was led by our resident ambassador Janet, who motivates the residents to join in the fun. The residents and their family enjoyed inventing new words to create the new highest word score, which is currently at 15!

At a recent residents’ meeting, residents requested that we play a few of the more old-fashioned party games, starting with Consequences.  

The idea is that each player has a piece of paper and writes the beginning of a story. They fold the paper over, so the story is not visible, and pass it to the next person who will write the next part of the story. After passing the papers around the group several times, the story is complete and then read aloud with hilarious consequences.

It was a really funny game with surprising stories. Some of our residents were quite in tune with each other and made sweet and logical stories, the others were random and funny. We will certainly play again. 

We enjoyed an afternoon of making our own music with hand bells. The bells and the musical chords are colour coordinated for ease, but it was the rhythm that was the tricky part! Although Christmas was over, we chose a few well-known Christmas Carols to practice as Jingle Bells is familiar to all.  

After a few attempts, we managed it all the way through. It was exciting and a huge cheer of satisfaction went up as we completed it. Residents joked that we have started to practice early for a concert next Christmas, we may just be ready in time!

As the year came to a close, we were able to have fun with one of our favourite visitors, Michelle and her animals. Michelle has close to 30 animals that she takes care of and brings a selection to us for each visit.

Our favourite is Simon the cat, who happily accepts all of our cuddles! The tortoise and chicken are fascinating to watch too. Our resident Yvonne was excited to be photographed with a variety of animals so that her family overseas would be able to see what she was getting up to at Tennyson Wharf.