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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
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