Ideas and Innovation from 3N!

What activity has your class planned?

We notice that the elderly at Peace Connect come to the day activity centre to let time to let time pass by chit chatting, watching television, playing bingo, to name a few. All these are done among themselves only.

Our class little or no experience doing ventures involving elderly. So our class have come out with a series of simple tasks that will add variety to their daily activities and allow interaction between generations.

• How does this benefit the organization/ community that your class is serving?

We want to engage their minds and stimulate their thinking through these activities.

Folding origami with 1 on 1 attention. Levels of difficulty will begin with easy, followed by intermediate and difficult, so that there is progression and not too stressful on the elderly. These can develop hand-eye coordination and motor skill while enhancing memory, concentration and sense of accomplishment.

We are also leading the elderly through some exercises, such as easy stretching with slow and gentle movements so that they can follow it. We also ensure the elderly are properly supervised by us 1 on 1 and centre’s in-charge. We set different levels of difficulty for the exercises so that everyone can at least participate in the “very easy” level of exercise progressing to easy → intermediate → advanced. Most of the exercise are static and can be done standing up or sitting down.

We understand that the most popular game that the elderly play at the centre is Bingo. So we will play this game with them. Numbers will be read out and once they have gotten a straight line, call out bingo and they win a prize. To differentiate from the game the elderly usually play, we will prepare prizes and give out to as many elderly as possible.

We also want to add more to the ‘live’ atmosphere and hype up the elderly. So we planned some songs from different languages for a sing along session followed by a dance performance ended with a class sing along finale. We hope to show the elderly a contemporary dance performance. Some simple dance steps will be included in the routine, so as to allow the elderly to dance along should they wish to. Though we are not sure what kind of response we will get or if they get be bored, but we will try our best.

• What preparation needs to be done/what preparation has been done?

We broke into groups and each group delved deep into the planning and we practiced executing the activities with our own classmates. With our minimal experience, we acknowledged that no amount of preparation can get us fully ready for the actual day, but we are optimistic. We know that the elderly have their lunch daily at 12 noon so we also ordered packed food and drinks for them. The cost for prizes for the bingo game as well as the stationeries for the origami we split among us.

#3N