Senior Activities for Activity Directors

Keeping elderly people in tiptop physical and mental shape means more than bingo and card games. Senior activities for activity directors cover a wide range of ideas that evoke laughter, stretch muscles and boost cognitive thinking skills. A good starting place for activity leaders is asking participants for suggestions. This input ensures that senior citizen programs capture a broad variety of interests and skill levels while at the same time offering safety. These events should replace boredom and redundancy with productive fun.

  1. Fitness

    • Plan some exercise classes for your senior group that accommodate different fitness levels. Walking clubs are popular, but also incorporate some basic stretching and toning events that are beneficial to everyone, says the Not Just Bingo website. Give residents some plastic tennis racket so they can swat inflated balloons back and forth. Distribute one-pound barbells so your class participants can work their arm muscles. Play classical or new age music to set a relaxing mood, and always supply water to prevent dehydration during any program that involves physical activity.

    Legacy

    • Encourage older citizens to share their personal histories with others. Ask residents to write autobiographical styles of questions on sheets of paper. Suggestions include inquiries about how they celebrated holidays as a child or what was their earliest memory. Visitors---especially children who get bored---get to draw one of the questions at random and hear the elderly resident's recollections of bygone days. This exercise encourages interactions among family members beyond routine questions about a senior's health or the weather, according to Care Crunch website for caregivers.

    Social

    • Facilitate some social activities where seniors mingle and joke. Buy assorted items from a discount store, wrap them and stage an auction with phony money, activities director Gina Salazar suggests at The Activity Directors Office website. Watch how much fun your guests have when they outbid each other without knowing the contents of each wrapped package. Distort some of the items by wrapping a small pack of gum inside a giant box. Or, coordinate a karaoke program where even the most off-key singers are hits.

    Newsletter

    • Launch a newsletter by rounding up some senior volunteers to author, type and edit articles about their community, suggests the Not Just Bingo site. Allow your group to brainstorm over content and layout ideas for a publication that informs and entertains readers. Persuade administrators to submit articles as well. Keep the newsletter to one page to prevent volunteers from feeling overwhelmed with the workload. The objective of this printed bulletin is to encourage collaboration among the contributors.