Activities at Tixover House Care Home

Our residents love when we bring fresh flowers to their room, it makes for a wonderful sensory activity, seeing the flowers, touching the flowers, smelling the flowers. It makes for lovely conversations too, a way of easily bringing the outdoors indoors for our residents. 

Gardening Club remains a regular Monday club of our home, enjoyed by residents across each department. It includes such a variety, recently enjoying rock art and making paper flowers for upcoming themed events, Oktoberfest and MacMillan Coffee Morning.    

In a recent Resident’s Meeting, our residents asked for a gin tasting afternoon and a cheese and wine night. Activities and the kitchen team delivered upon these food-based activities and more, with the Head Chef delivering a cocktail in the afternoon too. 

There are lots of plans in place to make these events regular within our home, seeing the popularity amongst our residents and their family during their visits.    

We are very lucky to have a regular supply of flowers from a neighbour of our home, which we flower arrange as an activity and then sit and paint with watercolours.

This activity was particularly special as we were joined by our resident's grandchild, who happily chatted away as she filled sheet after sheet with drawings and paintings, much to our resident's admiration. We adore inter-generational activities within our home.          

New entertainment within our home and it was a huge hit in our Memory Lane dining room, with all residents involved in the workshop.   

The residents who made a flower arrangement have within their bedrooms, the rosemary within the arrangement is filling their rooms with wonderful scents. The following day, activities took a completed flower arrangement to all the bedrooms in our Nursing Community and completed a sensory activity.

Our residents loved a recent trip to view the beautiful flowers at Elton Garden Centre. 

Our residents always love this location, saying it does the best coffee! We loved going up and down the garden centre, looking at flowers (many of which we hadn't seen before or for some time).     

We recently spent a wonderful morning at one of our local favourites. The residents were enjoying a morning full of laughter & some seriously good coffee and cakes! Our Activities Assistant shared photos and videos with our residents, much to their enjoyment, with lots of questions and reminiscing to follow.

It really was a giggle a minute and was thoroughly enjoyed by all! Other recent outings have included, Barrowden duck pond, Rutland Water Garden Centre and Mulberry Café, Elton; truly a highlight of many of our resident’s weeks, to be out and about in sunshine, fresh air and the community surrounding our home.

We had fun in the home putting together our resident's words of wisdom for school children. Our residents are in particular looking forward to receiving children's words of wisdom in return, noting how important intergenerational relationships are to them. We had individual room visits full of reminisce, talking about the resident's school days. 

Please feel free to either post words of wisdom to our home or collate and email across to tixover.activities@barchester.com at, Caroline Geddes.

Our activities' coordinator, Denise, brought a lot of colour to our home by bringing sunflowers in. She spent time as part of a gardening club taking the flowers round the home and speaking about sunflowers. It is so important to bring the outside into our home and this activity was enjoyed by all. Look at the pure joy brought to our Nursing Community through carrying out this meaningful activity. 

Memory Lane was also shown the sunflowers and residents within the home were, as always, given the opportunity to paint the flowers when displayed within a vase in the main dining room. The whole home was truly touched through one action of simply bringing flowers into the home and the timing was impeccable in time for Sunflower Day in our home.

We loved what Evie brought to our home on a recent visit. Evie brought her flute, having played for 5 years since she was 12 through the army cadets. Evie played her flute and sang her way through each room visit at our Nursing Community. Evie then went to our Memory Lane and completed a Royal Ascot themed room visit, colouring, true or false quiz, reading and word searches. 

One resident told Evie how she used to ride vintage bikes from Royal Ascot to Brighton. Evie then provided a companionship visit over lunchtime, playing Guess Who, Connect 4 and Battleships. It was a hoot to sit in on this, so much laughter, a real uplifting intergenerational activity.

Thank you to Stone Streets Sounds for a fabulous music through the ages production during our Dementia Action Week, a fantastic afternoon for all those involved. 

It was especially lovely to see the interactions between residents and residents and staff and residents.  

These wonderful children came into our home, having rehearsed at home a short puppet show to share with our residents. They then matched our residents' hobbies and interests. For example, we both sat in a room for the best part of an hour with our resident's sketch pad, pencils and colouring pencils, drawing pictures for our resident, chatting merrily throughout and leaving the signed artwork. 

Our residents didn't stop smiling throughout, asking questions and being super engaged.   

Our residents always enjoy a themed day in our home and this recent themed day was no exception. Residents in the lead up to the day enjoyed colouring elephant designs and exploring Oomph activity packs. We had an African-themed water colour painting activity and explored African travel in our nursing community. 

Our staff team got involved and shared their African culture on room visits in addition to their nursing duties, so for this we are so grateful, and it is a wonderful example of the whole home approach to life enrichment, diversity and variety in activity deliverance. One of our nurses kindly shared an African dance with a bed-bound resident whilst on one of his working nights.     

Thank you to our lovely intergenerational-link who kindly put on a MacMillan Coffee Morning recently for our home. We enjoyed so many home-made cakes and hot and cold refreshments, they had decorated the home so splendidly and we enjoyed garden games too. 

We couldn't believe the amount of effort they went to for our visit and we are so grateful. We cannot wait to see you again soon. A huge thank you for the invitation to our home. Thank you to Tracey for supporting activities with this outing.    

A huge thank you to Activities Denise and our new intergenerational link with Corby Old Village Primary School. You will remember this school kindly helped with a resident's recent big birthday by making decorations. 

They have now kindly written letters and the most fun and fabulous jokes which have had our residents smiling and laughing, pure joy! Thank you for your kindness and I look forward to seeing this relationship blossom.’

Our residents enjoyed a new location for an outing, as we went to New Lodge Farm recently. It is such a beautiful cafe and farm shop which we enjoyed exploring. 

We really loved looking at the beautiful floral and art work on display as well as taking a walk looking at gifts and produce to buy. Where to next? Let us know your favourite local places to visit..