Recharging Retirees in Retirement Communities

Apples to Apples is a game of comparisons and lots of laughs! In my retirement community, there has been a consistent group that has played Scattergories for the past few years, and they were starting to get a bit bored. As I mentioned in an   earlier article about Scattergories,   they went from playing once a week to every other week. This past year, they decided to take a break over the summer. When the volunteer leader came to me we spoke and decided to try to introduce another game. I brought in   Apples to Apples   and we played for the first time this week. It was such a fun night. For those who've played before, you will see that I took the basics and added another step to the game in order to bring the group of 20 together. This is what I did: Set-up card tables with 4 chairs per table The RED cards were divided by the number of tables that we had full and each portion was placed onto the center of each card table Invited the gro...

You probably have held a Cruise Night, a Cinco de Mayo, an Evening in Paris, Luau, Oktoberfest and other theme parties which were destination based. Those types of parties are all lots of fun and you might have done them time after time, with a twist, I 'm sure, with much success. The next time you sit down to plan such a theme party, stop thinking about them as separate events! Recently, I started out planning a Cruise Night and then I switched it up to be Cruise Around the World Night. I used the basis of the cruise night theme for my decorations and then enhanced the decorations with items from different world-cruise ports of call. My favorite decoration out of my cruise box are peel an stick port holes that show the ocean outside. I put them around the walls of the lobby so that it looked like we were on-board the ship. I invited the residents to participate in the evening by dressing as if they were tourists, or locals from their favorite port of call. I had a few ...