A Snoezelen room is a multi-sensory room that uses gentle lights, relaxing smells, and soothing sounds that can calm your senior residents with dementia. It allows you to take a resident who is agitated or frustrated and immediately provide them with sensory stimulation that can pacify them. By creating a sensory area in your facility that is stocked with essential sensory elements, you’ll be prepared to help calm your residents when necessary.

How can a Snoezelen room or sensory area help your residents? There are several benefits that sensory areas provide:

Sensory Areas Reduce Stress and Anxiety – Repetitive toys that have motion can help relax the mind while providing a physical outlet for anxious energy. For example, if during the day, you have a resident that seems stressed, then provide them with a fidget toy to help redirect their nervous energy.

Sensory Areas Improve Focus and Concentration – Fidget toys and visual toys, like bubble tubes, can help residents improve their focus. For instance, if you find that one of your residents is not very focused during one of your activities, then supply her with a visual toy that can help her redirect her restlessness and increase her attentiveness.

Sensory Areas Provide Sensory Integration – Sensory items that have different textures, shapes, and weights can help stimulate your residents’ senses.

Sensory Areas Nurture Fine Motor Skills – Fidget toys can help your residents improve their fine motor skills. By using their hands to manipulate the toys, they can increase flexibility among their fingers while boosting their hand-eye coordination.

How do you create a Snoezelen room or sensory area in your facility?

To create a sensory room, simply find a small room, area, or even a corner in your facility where you can set up sensory items that allow for interaction and engagement by your residents. To stock your sensory area, consider using a sensory kit that contains a variety of items that address the different senses, including visual, olfactory, and auditory.

One idea for a sensory kit is a calming kit. With a basic calming kit, you’ll find noise-canceling headphones that your residents can wear when they find the environment to be too noisy. In addition, the kit has a weighted gel lap pad that provides visual stimulation as well as the weight needed to calm and soothe them as the pad rests on their lap. The kit also provides fidget objects and sensory toys that your residents can use to redirect their energy, as well as a few emotion-feelings games to play with your resident. Finally, the kit provides 100 mini velvet art posters that your residents can color with the provided colorful markers.

If you need more supplies, consider using the deluxe kit that contains everything found in the basic kit, plus a few extras, like playdoh and sculpting tools and a therapy dog as a comforting companion. If, however, you want to start with a smaller kit, then look to the junior kit that provides the noise-canceling headphones, velvet art posters to color, and visual sensory items like bubble tubes that your residents can view to redirect their attention.

These kits will provide a good number of sensory activities for a sensory area in your facility that will help calm any anxious or unsettled residents.

Find more ideas from Notjustbingo on the S&S blog here.

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About Not Just Bingo:

Not Just Bingo 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 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 nursing 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!