Recognize the observances throughout the year that celebrate exercise – like National Senior Health & Fitness Day in May, or Global Running Day in June – to encourage your senior residents to get up and moving. Here are seven fun activities to encourage your seniors to walk more.
Scavenger Hunt
Pass out scavenger hunt photos for teams of residents to find as they walk. Use the indoor photos for when your residents walk your hallways and common areas looking for objects, and use the outdoor photos for when your residents walk your facility’s grounds in search for the objects in nature.
What Do You See That Is…
To break up the monotony of a seated exercise class, pick a day to lead residents on a fun walk through the hallways to get their exercise. To keep residents engaged, play the game What Do You See That Is… To play, simply name a color, and encourage residents as they follow you to call out items that they see along the walk that are that color. To keep the game competitive, be sure to award a point for each correct answer.
Hallway Track
Use streamers to create an indoor track in the hallways and common areas of your facility for residents to walk. Award your participants with track medals to wear and deliver trophies to those who are able to complete all the laps.
Puzzle Stations
To encourage more walking, set up several jigsaw puzzle stations throughout your facility, and encourage residents to walk the halls during the day to go to each of the stations to work on the jigsaw puzzles.
At each puzzle station, set out several jigsaw puzzles on tables for residents to stop by, sit, and work on. Use both small piece puzzles and large piece puzzles at the puzzle stations.
Walking Bags
Encourage residents to do more walking to show off their newly decorated walking bag that they can decorate with markers, paint, and adhesive gems. In fact, host a walker bag-decorating contest and have your facility’s Administrators judge the most interesting walking bag and award a fun prize.
Carnival Games
Set up three to four fun carnival games throughout your facility and encourage residents to walk to each game to play. Set up fun carnival games, like ring toss, can knock down, and washer toss.
Color Match
Invite residents to match colors to items in nature with a fun color match game. To play, pass out a paint chip to each resident to use to find items in nature that match their paint chip card. Encourage residents to walk the back patio and the gardens to see how many items in nature they can identify that matches their color card.
Find more ideas from Notjustbingo on the S&S blog here.
About Not Just Bingo:
Not Just Bingo is an online resource of fun, senior activity ideas for activity professionals of assisted living facilities. They have been providing fun activity ideas online since 2009, and continue to assist activity professionals across the country by creating meaningful and engaging activity ideas for their residents that go “beyond bingo.” Not Just Bingo feels privileged 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 senior facility!
Want even more ideas each month? Visit www.notjustbingo.com for how-to activity ideas, monthly newsletters, and daily holiday ideas. You can also sign up for the Notjustbingo Membership to receive specialized activity ideas to keep your residents and staff engaged, active, and having fun!
