Is your Activity Room pretty empty after lunch? Keep your nursing facility residents from losing energy in the afternoon by scheduling fun, interactive activities that keep your residents engaged after lunchtime. Here are a few tips from notjustbingo.com to get you started:
Add social games or icebreakers immediately after lunch for residents to engage with their fellow residents. Use fun games like Toss ‘n Talk-About® Reminiscing Ball to get residents talking with one another while also working their arm muscles.- Schedule physical games right after lunch to help residents burn off calories while beating the afternoon slump. Play games like indoor tennis, using plastic tennis rackets and inflated balloons, or pin pong to keep residents moving and having fun
- Award small prizes for your afternoon games to encourage your really competitive residents to participate. After all, who doesn’t want to win something? Simply create fun tournaments for the games that your residents usually enjoy, like bowling or a tossing game like this Tic Tac Toe Floor game, and award small prizes or trophies to the winners.
- Change the time of your daily Exercise Class to meet in the afternoons instead of
in the mornings. This way residents can keep their energy up after lunch so that they no longer want to take a nap. - Start an Afternoon Gardening Club and encourage residents to walk the halls to tend to the plants and flowers throughout your facility. Additionally, after lunch, keep your residents busy by helping you re-pot plants or create flower arrangements.
- Use food and drink to entice residents to attend your afternoon activities. For instance, on an afternoon in which you play a physical game, reward the participants with ice cream or popcorn.
- Finally, if you still find that your residents want to take a nap after lunch, consider re-scheduling a few of their favorite games, like Bingo, to take place after lunch.
About notjustbingo.com
notjustbingo.com is an online resource of fun, senior activity ideas for activity professionals of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. They have been providing fun activity ideas online since 2009, and we continue to assist activity professionals across the country by creating meaningful and engaging activity ideas for their residents that go “beyond bingo.” Don’t get them wrong – bingo is fun, but we want to spread the word that there is more to life than just bingo. Overall, notjustbingo.com feels privilege to help activity directors better the living experiences of their residents while demonstrating that a senior’s quality of life can actually improve when they move to a nursing facility.
I liked that a way you talked about how to keep people at a nursing home to come to things is by rewarding them with ice cream. If my grandmother was in an assisted living home I want to know she was having fun. It does seem like a good thing to be aware of if my family does seem to find a good place or my grandmother to go.