Monday, October 29, 2018

Think about National Bible Week now

Activities directors, caregivers, and healthcare professionals,here is interesting information
Here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professionals,

Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be

Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care  professionals to get an easyceu or two

Follow alzheimersideas on twitter

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

National Bible.org





Communities are strengthened and lives are renewed by the reading of the Bible. The celebration of National Bible Week is an annual opportunity to encourage everyone in your community to begin, or to begin again, to read the Bible.


Started in 1941, National Bible Week is celebrated from Sunday to Sunday of Thanksgiving week. Many national events highlight the importance of this week – such as the issuing of a Presidential message, the entering of statementsinto the Congressional Record, and our annual dinner in New York City.


But the real celebration of National Bible Week happens when real people begin to read the Bible.


Local activities focus the attention of the community on the Bible’s spiritual, moral, and cultural values, and inspire people to engage the world’s greatest book.


You can help encourage Bible reading in your community!Here are some activities and events that will encourage everyone to read the Bible for themselves. Get involved in as many of these activities and events as possible.We encourage you to assemble a broad-based group representing all faith traditions using the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.


Adapt the suggestions below for your community. Share with us what you do and we’ll feature iton our website. Email us at rbeni@nationalbible.org orwrite us at National Bible Association, 405 LexingtonAvenue, New York, NY 10174. 212-907-6427.(continued)


Request your public librarian to create a display of available books about the Bible (commentaries, Bible atlases,study helps) or literature inspired by biblical themes.


Encourage civic clubs such as Rotary, Lions, etc. todevote a meeting during National Bible Week to a speakerwho will develop a Bible-related theme such as the varietyof English translations, or the use of biblical principles inbusiness, etc.


Arrange for a community theater group or college drama club to perform a biblical play, or arrange for a freepublic showing of a film with a biblical theme.


Ask a community choral group or organize a mass choirfrom several houses of worship to present a public concert inwhich all selections are musical settings of biblical texts


Conduct a Bible reading marathon – a cover to cover,non-stop reading of the entire Bible – in a public place such asthe courthouse steps or in a shopping mall. The event takesapproximately 90 hours.


Create a ‘community Bible’ by asking individuals tohand-write the verses. In a larger community, youth groups ofvarious houses of worship could each take responsibility fora book of the Bible. In a smaller community, portions of theBible could be handwritten each year during November untilthe Bible is completed. The finished product might be presentedand permanently displayed in the public library.


Enlist volunteers to regularly read the Bible to theelderly who live alone or in retirement or nursing homes.


Organize a drive to collect used Bibles to be sent topeople who cannot afford to purchase a Bible of their own. Contact your state or regional Bible society or the BibleFoundation for additional information on where and how toship the used Bibles you collect.


Secure permission to use display cases at local shopsor churches to create a public display of unique Bibles ownedby community residents – antiques, large, small, differentlanguages, diglots (two languages in one edition), one carriedthrough a war.


Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaperexplaining how the Bible has impacted American culture andwhy it is important to celebrate National Bible Week.


Provide copies of National Bible Week public serviceradio announcements to each radio station in your community.Enlist a local business person to hand deliver the spots to thestation managers. Contact us at rbeni@nationalbible.org toobtain the spots.


Send press releases to all local media including informa-tion about each of the local activities you have planned. Be sureto provide the name of a contact person.

A sample press releaseis included in the National Bible Week Resource Packet.405 Lexington Avenue • 26th Floor • New York, NY 10174 • Phone: (212) 907-6427 • Fax: (212) 898-1147 • www.nationalbible.org • rbeni@nationalbible.org©1997-2007 National Bible Association.

All rights reserved.National Bible association NATIONAL BIBLE WEEK™Sunday to Sunday of Thanksgiving week each year.

Saturday, October 27, 2018

"Chicken Soup for the Soul" and fairy tales

Activities directors and other healthcare professionals here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professionals.


Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be


Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care  professionals to get an easyceu or two


Follow alzheimersideas on twitter

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

On Nov 12, we celebrate, “Chicken Soup for the Soul”, Day. I am sure you are familiar with “Chicken Soup for the Soul” stories. They are heartwarming true short stories that bring smiles to people’s faces.

Reading “Chicken Soup for the Soul” stories are a great time filler. You can have higher functioning residents, students, volunteers or staff members read these stories to the residents. I always read the stories with a lot of expression and enthusiasm asking questions as I read. This way you keep everybody’s attention.

You can find Chicken Soup for the Soul” stories online, you can borrow these books from the library or you can purchase them.

Here are some links to “Chicken Soup for the Soul” stories



I hope you will shared some “Chicken Soup for the Soul” stories with your residents this November and other times throughout the year.

Learn why fairy tales have some of the same positive attributes as "Chicken Soup for the Soul" stories in the February issue of the Activity Directors Today E-Magazine

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Famous people born in November activity

Activities directors and other healthcare professionals here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professionals.


Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be


Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care  professionals to get an easyceu or two


Follow alzheimersideas on twitter

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

Creating Together Journal

Do you know when these people were born in November?

Names
Susan Berg
Daniel Boone 
Burt Lancaster 
Roy Rogers 
Billy Graham 
Sally Field 
Katherine Hepburn 
Martin Luther 
Grace Kelly 

Dates
November 9, 1909
November 2, 1734
November 5, 1911
November 10, 1483
November 12, 1929
November 26, 1949
November 6, 1946
November 2, 1913
November 7, 1919



Answers: Daniel Boone: November 2, 1734, Burt Lancaster: November 2, 1913,  Roy Rogers: November 5, 1911, 
Billy Graham:  November 7, 1919,  Sally Field: November 6, 1946, Katherine Hepburn: November 9, 1909,  
9 Martin Luther: November 10, 1483, Grace Kelly: November 12, 1929, Susan Berg, November 26 1949.

When you do this activity, give hints such as higher or lower. Make it exciting!!

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

November special days to celebrate

Activities directors, caregivers, and healthcare professionals,here is some great information

Here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professionals,

Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be

Holiday Insights


  • Aviation History Month
  • Child Safety Protection Month
  • International Drum Month
  • National Adoption Awareness Month
  • National Caregivers Appreciation Month
  • National Diabetes Awareness Month
  • National Epilepsy Month
  • National Model Railroad Month
  • National Novel Writing Month
  • Native American Heritage Month
  • Peanut Butter Lovers Month
  • Real Jewelry Month
  • National Sleep Comfort Month
Week Celebrations:
  • Week 1 Chemistry Week
  • Week 3 Game and Puzzle Week
Men Make Dinner Day - first Thursday of Month
Book Lovers Day - first Saturday of the month
U.S. General Election Day - first Tuesday of the month after first Monday of month
Young Readers Day second Tuesday of month
Chaos Never Dies Day - you've got that right
17 Electronic Greeting Card Day - now who do you think created this day!?
17 Great American Smokeout  - third Thursday in November
19 National Adoption Day - Saturday before Thanksgiving
24 Thanksgiving - Eat, drink, and be thankful.
25 Black Friday - Friday after Thanksgiving
25 Buy Nothing Day - always the day after Thanksgiving...does anyone abide by it!?!
25 You're Welcome Day - the day after Thanksgiving
27 Advent begins

Sunday, October 21, 2018

November 1 is author's day

Activities directors and other healthcare professionals here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professionals

Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be


Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care  professionals to get an easyceu or two


Follow alzheimersideas on twitter

famous authors

Thumbelina “, “The Ugly Duckling “, “The Little Mermaid “, “The Emperor’s New Clothes “, and “The Princess and the Pea all by Hans Christian Anderson

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer.by James Fenimore Cooper

A Christmas Carol , Oliver Twist , Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and Great Expectations all by Charles Dickens<샄Ы> </샄ы>

Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Scarlet Letter or The House of the Seven Gables . By Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Raven, Murders In The Rue Morgue, The Mask Of Red Death, The Fall Of The House Of Usher, The Black Cat, The Pit And The Pendulum and The Tell-Tale Heart. By Edgar Allan Poe

Hamlet , Macbeth , Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. by Mark Twain

Journey to the Centre of the Earth , From the Earth to the Moon , 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea , The Mysterious Island and Around the World in Eighty Days. By Jules Verne

The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds. by H.G. Wells

The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. By Oscar Wilde

Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls,
by Ernest Hemingway
 





Sunday, October 14, 2018

November is Alzheimer's Awareness Month



Here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professionals,

Your residents will love the Amazon Kindle Fire

Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be

Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care  professionals to get an easyceu or two

Follow alzheimersideas on twitter

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



November is Alzheimer's awareness month
What are you doing to find out all you can about this mind robbing disease and related dementias?
Visit this blog often to find out the latest news.
Here is what the president had to say
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America
During National Alzheimer's Disease Awareness Month, we recognize the dignity and courage of the men and women living with Alzheimer's disease. We also honor the devoted family members and caretakers who bring them love and comfort, and we underscore our dedication to finding a cure for this tragic disease

read more

Friday, October 12, 2018

Dementia Patients Find Comfort in Robot

Activities directors and other healthcare professionals here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professionals.

Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be

Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care  professionals to get an easyceu or two

Follow alzheimersideas on twitter



By Fredrick Kunkle
Washington Post Staff Writer


One of the hottest therapeutic toys for people with dementia looks like a stray from the North Pole.

And it is a toy, sort of.....click here for more

Monday, October 8, 2018

Finding strength in adversity

Activities directors, caregivers, and healthcare professionals,here is some great information

Here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professionals,

Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care professionals to get an easyceu or two

Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be

Former nursing home chaplain regains purpose, hope as patient

During the six years Don Weaver served as chaplain at Signature HealthCARE in Erin, he never dreamed his life would come full circle during the next few years and bring him back to the facility once more – this time as a patient.

His story is one of perseverance, struggles, and faith.

Born in 1968 with infantile cerebral palsy, Weaver remembers leading a pretty normal life, even though he walked on crutches for 33 years. He graduated from high school, married and fathered three children – Isaac, Andrew and Kayla Beth.
He attended church regularly and eventually became a minister.

He moved with his family to East Tennessee for awhile, where he had the opportunity to serve as assistant professor of a congregation and then pastor.
All in all, he said his life was pretty good.

Until 2003.

That year, he began to suffer with muscle spasms that were so bad he had to undergo surgery. His life plummeted into a downward spiral that would last five years, cost him his family and leave him alone, wheelchair bound and emotionally wrecked.

He described the scars as, “deep scars that are not only physical but mental, as well.”

Having given no hope of ever walking again, Weaver said that he felt he had lost his ability to be a husband and a father. It also affected his desire to attend church.
“I lost hope, quit trying, and I simply gave up,” he stated. “There for awhile, I lost everything. I gave up on God, gave up on life.”

He started drinking and his 17-year marriage collapsed. After his wife left, Don was able to get 24-hour nursing care at home until September 2008, when his benefits were cut.

Angry, depressed, unable to care for himself and unable to control some bodily functions, Weaver had no choice but to be admitted to Signature HealthCARE.
“I was not thrilled … to be 40 years old in a nursing home,” he said. “To be honest, it’s still tough for me, but I realize this is the best place for me. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t come here.”

After getting over the initial pains of being in a nursing home, Weaver began to work in physical therapy and little by little he began to believe in himself, and God, again. 

Saturday, October 6, 2018

Coming Full Curcle

Here is an inteeresting article about learning in those with dementia
New York Times
By JOHN LELAND

IN a colorfully decorated room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a half-dozen bright minds were engaged in a Montessori exercise called category-sorting. The categories were “dessert” and “non-dessert.” Pheona Yaw, who led the exercise, held up yellow cards with words on them.
“Carrots,” she said, reading from the first rectangular card. “Dessert or non-dessert?”
That was an easy one, the group agreed. “Not dessert,” they said. Ms. Yaw placed the card over a rectangular outline on the non-dessert side of the board.
She moved on.
“Strawberry shortcake,” she said, holding up the next card. “Dessert?”
“No, that’s not a dessert at all,” said Holly Kromer-Sharpe, decisively. Others disagreed. Ms. Yaw put the card aside and moved on to pizza, on which there was agreement: pizza was not a dessert. Then she returned to strawberry shortcake.
“Dessert or non-dessert?” she asked.
Holly Kromer-Sharpe again spoke first. “I think that’s a dessert, yeah,” she said, just as firmly, as if the question itself were an affront. “What’re you trying to do, anyway?”
In a typical Montessori classroom, teachers use category-sorting exercises to help young students see patterns and connections. But the participants in this group were mostly in their 80s and on the other side of the cognitive development curve. They are residents at an assisted-living facility for people with dementia called Hearthstone at the Esplanade, which has six other homes in New York State and Massachusetts. Since July the residents have participated in a full-time program of Montessori-based activities designed for people with memory deficiencies.
Continue reading the main story
The program was created by Cameron J. Camp, an experimental psychologist who has applied childhood education principles to people often considered past the point of teaching. Through the Myers Research Institute in Beachwood, Ohio, where Dr. Camp developed training seminars and materials, dozens of nursing facilities around the country now use his curriculum.
A common misconception about people with dementia, Dr. Camp said, is that they no longer learn. But they do: residents learn to find their dining room table, for example, well after the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. And because they no longer have the higher brain function they had as adults, he reasoned, they are well suited to Montessori.
Developed by Maria Montessori in Rome in the early 20th century, the Montessori method holds that young children learn best when they direct their own learning, with teachers providing tools that engage all their senses. Children learn through their hands and muscle memory, as well as through their eyes and brains. A child might learn the letter C by rubbing her hand over a sandpaper cutout in the letter’s shape while sounding out the letter, using sight, sound and touch together.
Dr. Camp began to consider a similar approach for people with dementia in 1983, while working with the elderly at an adult day center in New Orleans just as his 3-year-old son entered a Montessori school. His wife was a Montessori preschool teacher.
“I started to see all these things that would translate from one to the other,” Dr. Camp said.
At the Montessori school, a boy had trouble focusing on his lessons. At the adult center, a woman with Alzheimer’s who had just regained her vision through cataract surgery became terrified when anyone moved her wheelchair. Dr. Camp saw a parallel. Both were overstimulated by background sensations — the boy because he could not shut out peripheral signals to focus on the task at hand; the woman because her surgery enabled her to see all the boundaries and edges around her, and she thought she was in danger of crashing or falling.
The solutions were similar. The teacher had the boy do the exercise with his eyes closed; the woman held her eyeglasses whenever she was moved. Both improved, and eventually learned to make do without the intermediary step.
As many as 5.2 million people in the United States have Alzheimer’s, including about one in eight people over age 65, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. This number will probably grow as baby boomers pass through their 60s and 70s. No drugs have been proven to do more than slow the disease’s progression. As the Alzheimer’s population grows, nursing homes and geriatricians are working to rethink the possibilities of life with the disease.
The Montessori-based programs for the elderly build on the work of Barry Reisberg, a New York psychiatrist who coined the term “retrogenesis” to 
describe the way the mind’s deterioration reflects its development: the first faculties to develop are the last to go. For instance, children around age 2 begin to understand their image in a mirror as a reflection of themselves, rather than a separate person; people in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s lose that distinction and are often frightened by mirrors, especially in bathrooms, where they think a stranger is watching them. Understanding this helps gerontologists recognize the problem not as random disorientation but as a predictable condition.
“We don’t say they’re crazy, we say this is where they are in the sequence,” Dr. Camp said. “The fix is that you put a window shade on the mirror. But you only come up with the fix if you say, ‘Why is this happening?’ ”
read more

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Statue of Liberty



Activities directors and other healthcare professionals here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professionals. Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be

Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care  professionals to get an easyceu or two


Benevolant Society On Oct. 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty, a gift to the United States from the people of France, was officially unveiled to the public by President Grover Cleveland.

It's been over a hundred years since the Statue of Liberty found her home in the harbor of New York and it has become an important part of American culture. But would you believe that Lady Liberty was actually a gift from the French? Read on for more fun facts on the Statue of Liberty.

Building Lady Liberty
The Statue of Liberty was built by French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, with the help of tons of workers working ten hour days, seven days a week for nine years! The statue was finally finished in 1884 and presented to America on July 4th. It didn't arrive in the United States until many months later though, cuz all 350 individual pieces of the statue had to be packed into 214 crates for the long boat ride from France to New York.

The Statue of Liberty Comes to America
It was on Bedloe Island that the Statue of Liberty was reconstructed in America - the island is now called Liberty Island and is only accessible by ferry. Auguste Bartholdi thought that the New York harbor was the perfect setting for his masterpiece because it was "where people get their first view of the New World." The statue was to be a symbol of welcome for all immigrants coming to America, as well as a universal symbol of freedom.

Statue of Liberty Poem for Kids
Paul Perro, a children's writer, has written a great poem about the Statue of Liberty. You can read it online at History-For-Kids.combirthday on October 28th in honor of the day she was officially accepted by the president of the United States in 1886.

Statue of Liberty Quick Facts
  • The Statue of Liberty celebrates her
  • Visitors must climb 354 stairs to reach the Statue of Liberty's crown (or take an elevator to a lower lookout point).
  • There are 25 windows in Lady Liberty's crown.
  • The seven spikes on the Statue of Liberty's crown represent either the seven oceans or the seven continents.
  • The statue is made of copper and is now green in color because of oxidation (a chemical reaction between metal and water) from evaporation of the seawater surrounding it.
  • The Staue of Liberty weighs 450,000 pounds (204, 100 kilograms).
  • The Statue of Liberty has size 879 sandals that are each 25 feet (7.6m) long.