Celebrating we are family day

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The Dementia Caregiver's Little Book of Hope [Kindle Edition]

March 11 is International We Are Family Day

Here is how we celebrated it in the past. Use some or all of these ideas?

We celebrated it by showing everyone why the residents, family members, staff, volunteers and anyone else who visits make your facility a great family.

Enthusiastically we told everyone involved that there is a special bond and common goals that they all share. Also tell them that they should be proud of this family.  We mentioned that individuals in any good family work together in respectful and cooperative ways to promote a good environment for everyone.

 We played the song, We Are Family. We substituted the names of people or groups of people like CNAs, nurses, activity department employees or whoever you want to mention as being part of the family.

We did this simple activity, especially for lower functioning groups, which is to do the ABCs of peoples’ names. Especially focus on the names of people who are residents, resident family members and/or staff members. Then say that all the people mentioned are part of the facilities family. To make this activity easier, just have residents mention as many random names as they can think of. You can show the residents pictures of familiar people or you can invite staff to make a brief appearance and have them mention their name. You can then repeat their name(s) and invite residents to say the names with you. At the end of the activity, make sure to say that everyone is part of the facility family.

Another activity we did was make a family quilt. Each resident, staff member, volunteer or family member, who wanted to, decorated a piece of cardstock with help if necessary. Even though quilts are usually made up of squares, using an 8.5 x 11 piece of cardstock might be easier and less costly. When everyone, who wanted to completed his/her piece, we put all the pieces together. This showed everyone that each person is part of a bigger family. All who want to are to put whatever they want to represent themselves or their family. They used photos, drawings, fabric, paint, words anything they want to that fits on the piece of cardstock. It is amazing to see how it looked after it was all put together.

I hope you have brought warm happy feelings into the lives of your residents, family members, staff and volunteers by celebrating International We Are Family Day.

Here is one of our quilts