As always, this month has been full of fun, friendship and laughter with experiences added in.
The first week of the month our theme was Guy Fawkes and Bonfire night. Members made a life size wicker man in our garden, to go along with our homemade tissue paper sparklers. We learnt a little about Guy Fawlkes history.
Next, we had Kindness week which included Remembrance Day and thinking of the fallen, making Poppy inspired decorations to honour the sacrifice they had made. This took many forms to enhance fine motor skills and hand eye co-ordination, from scrunching tissue paper to collage making, spotting the red colours in magazines to cutting them out. We continued the Kindness week by looking at how we treat each other and noting how many times we can and do care for each other we kept a chart on the wall and gave everyone stamps when they we ‘caught being kind’ we loved counting our stamps and they seemed to add up very quickly. Of course, we couldn’t ignore Children in Need in the form of Pudsey, some members donated money. We enjoyed making our own Pudsey.
The Third week this month was Movies and Theatre, we attended an inclusive cinema viewing of IF it was great we almost had the cinema to ourselves, we meet with another care provider and some of our friends too. This trip marked celebrating one of our members very special 18th Birthday and they had a great day celebrating with their friends. We discussed our favourite films and recreated the poster making ourselves the main characters, move over Tom Cruise!
Our Final week this month is life skills, we pride ourselves in Eastleigh that all our members participate in the care of the location and they have already gained experiences in many areas such as cleaning, hoovering, using the dishwasher, making health and safety checks around the location and they get reported back to Guy. So we thought a challenge we haven’t tried yet would be to re-decorate! A change is as good as a rest and we a looking to have a spruce up to prepare the location for a new year ready for new friends that will come to join us. Watch this space to see the new and improved Eastleigh.
Would you believe we have had time to get out of the location most days whether it is a walk around the local village, a trip to the park or more structures trips such as the Cinema and a trip to Marwell Zoo where we met up with other James’ Place locations.
We have also created workshops to run alongside our themes to draw on our teams’ strengths such as baking, foraging, creativity, love of books, gardening and many more. We hope in the new year to encourage co-learning with our members and the team.