With lots of observances centered around the visual arts, including March being National Craft Month, World Art Day in April, and Fine Art Appreciation Day in October, why not help your residents appreciate the creative expression through fun crafts and activities.
Here’s a week of themed activities that relate to the visual arts to add to your monthly activity calendar:
Sunday – Drawing
Invite one of your artistic volunteers or family members to teach a fun class on how to draw basic objects. Provide the class with newsprint paper and colored pencils to follow the teacher’s instruction.
After the class, encourage residents to build upon what they learned with the help of tools like stencils or even pre-printed doodle drawings that they can trace using tracing paper.
Monday – Painting
Help your residents tap into their inner Van Gogh and Michaelangelo as you provide fun painting activities. For instance, expose residents to the world of watercolor by having them use watercolors to fill in pre-printed posters, like watercolor lighthouse posters and floral designs. In addition, pass out paint-by-number drawings that residents can easily fill in with their watercolors.
For your acrylic paint lovers, use acrylic craft kits that allow residents to fill in the art with the kit’s acrylic paints. Additionally, use wooden crafts, like birdhouses, for residents to paint in fun colors using the acrylic paints.
Tuesday – Sculpture
Tap into your residents’ creativity to see what fun objects they sculpt using a sculpting kit sculpting kit. For the activity, supply residents with the foam shapes and the markers from the kit to create interesting pieces of art.
Afterwards, invite residents to play a fun sculpting game. To play, pass modeling clay for residents to use. Then name an object and give residents five minutes to see who can sculpt the best replica of the object that you name.
Wednesday – Photography
Assist residents with capturing art by taking digital photos of themselves and others with your facility’s camera to print out and place in wooden frames, like a regular picture frame or even a love picture frame, that can be decorated.
Thursday – Printmaking
Show residents how to use the sun to create “nature prints.” For the activity, help residents gather a variety of elements from nature, like leaves, flowers, and pine cones. Then show residents how, to set the items on nature print paper to create vibrant prints using the sun’s rays.
Friday – Architecture
Have fun with architecture as you provide residents with wooden birdhouses that look like buildings that they can decorate and set outdoors for your neighborhood birds. Conversely, have residents paint the birdhouses to set indoors as a fun scenic town vignette in a common area of your facility. Simply add holiday lights during the winter or beautiful flowers during the spring.
Saturday – Ceramics
Finish the week by showing residents how to decorate ceramics that they keep in their rooms or give as gifts. For instance, if you plan your art week during gardening season, then host a gnome-decorating contest to see who can decorate the most interesting gnome. Additionally, if you have your ceramics activity during the holiday season, then provide residents with ceramic star ornaments to decorate and give as gifts to loved ones.
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!
