Activities at Wheatlands Care Home

At Wheatlands residents enjoy lots of group activities in and around there home where they enjoy socialising together and making new friends. But its equally important to have some one to one time and to be able to pursue hobbies and interests this in turn increases the wellbeing and happiness of our residents.

Duncan is a keen bird watcher and he used to ensure his birdfeeders at his bungalow where always full, depending on the time of year it could be birdseed, fat balls or mealworms.

Every fortnight Duncan will go round the grounds of Wheatlands and ensure all our feeders are topped up. At the end of which we sit down with a well-deserved coffee and watch and listen to the birds making their nests. Sometimes we will look on the National Trusts live webcams and take a look at the birds inside the bird houses creating their nests ready for their chicks to be born.

To celebrate British flower week we hosted numerous events throughout the week our residents enjoyed flower arranging, still life drawings of plants and also going for lots of walks in the fresh air looking at all the beautiful flowers and plants we have growing here at Wheatlands and also the surrounding area. To finish the week off in style we invited friends and family to join us in the sensory garden for a morning of all things flowers! Residents and families enjoyed planting a variety of plant and vegetable seeds together where we can look forward to watching them grow and then eating the vegetables we have sown. After which we enjoyed doing a flower based quiz whilst enjoying some tasty fruit kebabs that the residents had prepared prior to the event.

To celebrate World Music Day on Wednesday 21st June residents enjoyed a Zoom call from Much Wenlock Nursery School the children sang and performed for the residents in our memory lane community. They all thoroughly enjoyed it and loved seeing the little children’s faces on the television and them being able to talk to them it was even more special for one resident Ruth as she used to be a primary school teacher and it brought lots of memories flooding back about yesteryears of her being a teacher and also when she was at Primary school.

After a few months of planning am pleased to say our first official day of our Co-creation project with Royal Airforce Museum Midlands has begun. Over the coming months our residents will be helping Paula the community engagement manager from Royal Airforce Museum Midlands and her team of amazing volunteers Victoria , Mike and Paul to co-create and develop immersive boxes that then will be lent out via the Museum for children's groups, schools to residential and care homes. We enjoyed looking at selection of handling objects that could possibly be used for the immersive loan boxes. Residents enjoyed talking about their own experiences and sharing their memories with the team from Royal Air Force Cosford. We can't wait for our next meeting and are. Looking forward to watching the project develop.

Keeping in touch with family is really important to our residents. Wendy speaks to her daughter numerous times a week be it in person, over the telephone or Via facetime.

As Sharon Wendy’s daughter is visiting family in Bali for 3 weeks its hard for Wendy to  be able to talk to Sharon due to the time difference in quality of the internet. Sharon emailed the home and asked that we sit and read though a letter she wrote her mum and sent via email.

Wendy enjoyed reading the letter ‘ I can’t believe Matthew and Benjamin are old enough to be graduating’

‘It sounds like Benjamin being laid back he’s always been like that’ she said.

After enjoying reading the letter we drafted a reply and I sent back via email.

Dementia action week saw various activities throughout our memory lane community from gardening and sowing our forget me not seeds a symbol used by the alzheimer’s society to a morning of sport including table tennis and air hockey. We also enjoyed a fantastic 1950’s reminiscence session over a coffee and a slice of homemade cake. The topic of conversation was the hate of getting into a cold tin bath in front of the fire on a Sunday afternoon and ensuring you weren’t naughty otherwise you would be the last child to use the bath.