Activities at The Fernes Care Home
At The Fernes we endeavour to make our care as personal as possible, including when it comes to activities. We will give you a 'Getting to Know Me' booklet for you to fill out with your loved one before they arrive, which includes a little life history and a tick sheet for a vast amount of activities. This enables us to offer the activities we know they will enjoy and enables us to learn valuable information about their lives and what might stimulate them in conversations and trips.
Our specialist Activities and Lifestyle staff make sure there are always meaningful activities to take part in, such as helping in the garden, baking some bread to have with our dinner, and trips out to various locations nearby such as the beach and the garden centres. Residents are encouraged to take part, but it is always the resident’s choice to participate or not as we believe that having choice is very important to help our residents feel in control of their lives. There are activities on offer every day (and night for those night owls) in the form of word puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, arts and crafts, needle crafts and board games to name a few. We have entertainment that is organised at least twice a month such as Music for Health, Zoolab or musicians, and also have a wonderful Yoga instructor who comes every other week.
Activities are provided by everyone in our home from carers and specialised activities staff, right through to our admin team. If there is a task that needs doing and a resident would like to do it, such as sealing envelopes and putting stamps on or handing out popcorn for our Movie Mondays, they are very welcome to help out which enables us to give them a better feeling of purpose and self-worth.
We are a registered member of the National Activity Providers Association (NAPA), which means that we are always working to make the quality of life of all of our residents as high as possible by working with person-centred activities that aim to stimulate our residents, both mentally and physically.
Sophie Wasteney
Hi, I'm Sophie, I am the Activities Lead at The Fernes. I've worked in the care sector for 26 years and here at The Fernes for 3 of those. When I started here I worked in care so really got to know the residents, relatives and home very well. When the Activities Lead role arose I naturally jumped at the opportunity as it was one aspect of care I really wanted to do as I really enjoy making people happy. As you cannot put a price on a smile!
Read our brochure 'Life-enriching activities' for more information about life in our care homes.
Read our brochure
Activities and Events Partnerships
As part of our bespoke life-enrichment programmes, we host a number of live virtual events in the home on a regular basis through a number of partnerships with places of interest and world class performance companies
Life at The Fernes Care Home
VE Day Celebrations
We had the most wonderful celebrations on VE Day, our local postman asked if his partner who makes bunting etc, could help in anyway and she came up trumps, she made some lovely bunting for us which were able to decorate the whole home she even made homemade cards to give to our residents, which was really special touch.
We began the party with singing all the old songs, and we danced as dancing is always something we love to do here at The Fernes. We honoured the 2 minutes silence and had the bugle playing the Last Post, it was an emotional day as you can imagine we had lots of stories from the war days and it brought some sad and also wonderful memories for us all.
Our hospitality team baked some old time favourites for us which we all enjoyed with a cup of tea.
National Tea Party
Here at The Fernes, we celebrated National Tea Party day together, we decorated the café area with homemade bunting that we had produced the week before in our Arts and Craft session. We had a lovely delivery from Barchester of various teas and green tea cans, which took a bit of persuading to try but when we did, we actually were all surprised how lovely the green tea tasted!
We had baked all our cakes in our Baking Club, which is held by our hospitality team, and the residents love to get involved especially the end results when we can eat the cakes.
It was a lovely day doing what us brits do best drinking tea, although as the afternoon approached a few of the residents had a glass of wine, one resident said “It’s always lovely to get together and talk”
Queenie's Travelling Teapot
Queenie's Travelling Teapot cheered us all up, and kindly donated and delivered freshly baked muffins. They were huge and delicious! Queenie is a lovely local lady who wanted to bring a smile to our faces. She runs her own tea party business, and we will be ordering some cream teas in near future. Our local community has been very kind to us, delivering lots of different items for us to enjoy.
Kindness from the Community
We have been overwhelmed with gifts and items being donated to our home; we cannot believe how many people are thinking about us all at this time.
We have had 2 deliveries of flower, orchids and Easter gifts from Stewarts, our local garden centre. B&Q has donated flowers for our garden. The Co-op donated Easter eggs for our residents, and a very kind gentleman bought 52 eggs for us. We have had a free delivery from Pizza Hut, muffins made by a talented lady from Queenies Travelling Teapot, and a beautiful array of flowers from a local florist.
We would like to thank you all from the bottom of hearts.
St David's Day
St David’s Day was a day of celebration here at The Fernes. We had a fun arts & craft session making daffodils and celebrated with roast lamb for lunch; and then we even made our own Welsh cakes—which was a first for us—but they were delicious!
Messy Vintage - Hope Springs
We had another wonderful session of Messy Vintage; our wonderful volunteer, Jill, and her lovely helpers came along to host a session. This month we were celebrating spring.
Snowdrops are the first flowers to bloom after winter, giving us hope that spring is on its way. All of our residents look forward to the sessions and it all coincides with bible readings and hymns.
