Activities at Wood Grange Care Home

We love birthdays at Wood Grange, we celebrated Anne’s birthday in style.  Anne enjoyed a day spent with her family, receiving flowers, cards, gifts and enjoying this beautiful cake made by the kitchen team.

Our resident sat with her husband enjoying a romantic meal together for Valentine’s day, we had John Dalton playing his harp in the background to create a romantic atmosphere. John was fantastic and our residents really enjoyed hearing him play.

One of our residents enjoying exercise using our new parachute, this is a great activity to get our residents moving their arms. Physical exercise is great for our residents to avoid stiffness in the joints, it is also great to get the residents together for social interaction. But most importantly, it is great fun!

Staff and residents at Wood Grange are celebrating because their much-loved head chef, Radovan Smalo, has graduated from Barchester’s Chef Academy in the Class of 2022. The Academy is run by Barchester’s Hospitality Development and Standards Manager, Mervyn Knights, and helps chefs to both hone their skills and learn new ones, covering many different modules including cooking for residents living with dementia, budgeting, balancing flavours, minimising wastage, presentation skills and so much more.

Radovan started cooking in 2010 and worked his way up through the ranks from kitchen assistant.  He joined Barchester in 2019 as head chef at Wood Grange and he has never looked back.  He absolutely loves his job at Wood Grange where he finds the hours much more sociable than other chef positions.  He likes to chat to his residents to find out their likes and dislikes so he can present their food exactly the way they like it.  He loves to come up with new ways to surprise and delight his residents with nutritious and flavoursome home-cooked meals.

On Thursdays, Gosia who is one of our activities coordinators goes to the local Bourne market to purchase flowers. Gosia creates fantastic flower arrangements with our residents, this is always a favourite. Gosia will do a group activity and then take the flowers to residents in their rooms for them to help too. This activity gives great social interaction for our residents as well as using their creative skills.

This month we invited a local artist called Claire Bishop to come into the home to give a painting workshop using water colour paints. Claire was great with the residents, she started off with a group session and then visited some residents in their rooms. She taught our residents to paint poppies by using really simple steps/techniques, and as you can see from the photograph the residents did a great job! Some of our residents are very creative and love doing creative activities like this. We are looking forward to Claire’s visit next month.