Making Memories: What our residents got up to in January

The New Year has got off to a great start! We’ve had so much to celebrate at Oaklands, it’s been like one non-stop party!

We’ve had New Year, Chinese New Year, Burns Night and lots of special birthdays! Here are our residents’ highlights so far this year:

New Year’s Eve party

Our residents had a brilliant time at our New Year’s Eve party! All our incredible staff got involved and helped our residents celebrate New Year in the best way.

We shared plenty of activities to get ourselves ready for the new year, with active mind puzzles, quizzes on our interactive screen and a target game with bean bags and rings.

Chinese New Year

We had lots of fun celebrating Chinese New Year with an amazing Chinese-themed meal prepared by trained chef Dave.

We had beautiful decorations, including the lanterns our residents had made especially. We played games, ate fortune cookies, gave out red envelopes and listened to Chinese New Year music. We were even visited by Oaklands’ Chinese dragon!

Burns Night

We really got into the spirit of Burns Night, as our residents had their own hat and a thistle pompom for our party and our talented Head Chef, Katie, made haggis for everyone to try!

One of the most popular games with our residents was ‘Find my haggis’, which we eventually named ‘Hamish’! We had a great time trying to guess which named card Hamish was hiding under, with plenty of chances to win prizes!

Reminiscence therapy

Our residents have been enjoying some lovely activities, sharing happy memories with each other. We took the residents on a virtual tour to commemorate the London Underground opening. Margaret and Clive have been enjoying looking through interactive wartime books with lots of different pop outs. One of our ladies even remembers being away on VE Day and meeting her friends outside the palace!

Getting Creative

Our ladies and gents have been getting very creative, making their very own fish tanks from paper, as well as beautiful leaf art and aqua painting!

We also celebrated National Bird Day by crafting birds out of paper. As always, they turned out beautifully!

Residents’ meeting

At Oaklands, we pride ourselves on providing person-centred care, so we had a really meaningful residents’ meeting discussing what they would like to do and where they would like to visit this year, and what changes, if any, they would like us to make. It’s been great to hear what residents’ ideal life at Oaklands is like, so we can ensure it happens.

Raising money for our residents

We are so proud of our Head Chef, Katie, for climbing Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales, to raise money for Oaklands’ residents to go on a trip!

Katie really went above and beyond to put a smile on our residents’ faces. There is still time to donate, if you would like to, please click here.

Celebrations

We’ve had lots of special birthdays to celebrate this month, with Margaret turning 96, as well as our lovely residents Mary and Eileen’s birthdays. Our head chef Katie and chef Sheila made delicious personalised cakes for us all to enjoy. We also got to spend time celebrating our fabulous staff, Debbie, Mia, Mandy and Aranta on their birthdays.

We rounded off the year by celebrating our staff with the Oaklands Awards! The winners were:

Learner of the year 2022 – Louise

Attendance of the year 2022 – Tony

Completed their NVQ 2022 – Mia

Special recognition 2022- Mandy

Employee of the year 2022 – Mia

Our staff always go the extra mile to support our residents and they thoroughly deserved these awards for all of their hard work and dedication. We are so fortunate to have such amazing staff at Oaklands!

Follow us on Facebook and Instagram to see our latest activities. To arrange a visit to our person-centred home, call 02380 845759 or email info@oaklandsresthome.co.uk