We had a brilliant first week of October, learning all about historical events and created many craft projects. We visited Stone henge in our bus, which was a lovely day out as everybody was able to see what we were spending the day learning about. We also learnt about The Plague and sewed huge rats and painted crosses, which we then displayed in our tea room. We also spent another day during the week based on London’s Burning. We created some glass lanterns with tissue paper and card houses with plastic tea lights, they looked so effective. They also enjoyed playing the recorder learning the song as well as all singing and dancing, we ended the day with some stories and learning about the importance of fire safety.
We had a themed week of ‘The Great British Bake Off’, it was amazing. We created lots of beautiful cake themed crafts during the week such as Pin cushions for our art room, cushions for our sofas and bunting to go up in the unit. The Amount of effort and hard work that our members put into making these projects was brilliant, so we have ensured that they are up on display to be seen and used every day!! Many skills were used during this week such as cooking, numeracy, communication and listening. The Basingstoke and Eastleigh location came to visit us at the end of the week to have a baking competition, every cake looked absolutely amazing and were all so yummy!
We had a competition in the hall with all the james place locations together, the cakes were judged by Guy, Phoebe and Shannon. The winner was Eastleigh! The day was full of joy and smiles and it was lovely to socialise and spend time with the other JP locations!
During October we also visited The Theatre Royal in Winchester City Centre. We enjoyed last month when we saw the tiger who came to tea, so we decided to organise a trip to see the Gruffalo. It was “brilliant” the members had so much fun and we can’t wait for the next performance!
Last week, we had the Women’s Pastro Family visit us to tell us all about the harvest festival. We enjoyed eating jam sandwiches to celebrate, the time of year when crops have been gathered from the field and people can reflect and show gratitude for the food that they have. It was a lovely atmosphere with everybody singing and dancing to the hymns.
This month we have been enjoying the autumn weather, we have been going for regular walks in the morning and enjoying trips to the village park in the afternoon. We have been busy creating nature mobiles, hedgehog crafts and updating one of our display boards, which looks fantastic!
We have been on a few different trips this month!
We went to go see our friends at Basingstoke James Place for lunch this week, we then stopped of at Dummer Garden Centre on our way back to Andover and enjoyed looking in the aquatics centre and browsing around the gift shop and autumnal decorations.
We visited Milestones for the day, we took part in the Halloween sensory activities and walked around looking at the vintage vehicles, Victorian – style streets so that the members could experience what it would’ve looked like in the Victorian times. The members had a great time at the museum, we enjoyed a cup of tea and cake in the café before we headed back to Andover.
We visited Harrier Grange Care Home for trick or treating with the residents. The members enjoyed playing games in the dining room and socialised with the residents having lovely conversations. Both members who visited said that they ‘would love to go back again”.
