Animal Love

My theme days are on Saturdays. The night before I like to show a movie in our private activity room and have it relate to the theme if possible. For this month's theme I asked the residents for a good animal movie and they immediately agreed that the "Lassie" with Elizabeth Taylor was a great choice. I served popcorn and made sure the volume was at a good level and even the residents who have seen it many times seemed to enjoy it.

We began Saturday with a chat about animals. I asked for pet stories, took a poll about the resident's favorite type of animal, and then brought out a giant book filled with pictures of many different types of mammals. The pictures brought back many memories and spontaneous comments and we had some good laughs. One resident remembers the fence she had to crawl through on the way to school because a neighbor's sheep would always head butt her before she could make her way to the other side of it.

Next we played Animal Sounds Bingo. The Bingo cards have pictures of animals on them and a CD of animal noises gets played. The residents must identify the sound then mark off the corresponding animal on their card until someone fills up their nine-space card.

After lunch we took a walk and then I offered everyone "Parrot Cocktails" (mostly ginger ale and grenadine but I put grenadine in other beverages as well). Finally we were ready for our party.

pony fruit snacks, teddy grahams, gummy bears, goldfish, and animal crackers

Everyone got a sheet with a word search on one side of people who have February birthdays and the other of an animal word game. For that there were two phrases using one common animal word that must be filled in the middle. For example "Gummi _____ Hug". The answer is "Gummi Bear Hug"

When everyone had a snack and a drink and time to finish up the sheet we went over the answers together. We sang happy birthday for the residents born this month, years ago. We recognized one resident for completing her goals in a program she was in. The last thing we did as a group was to give captions to funny pictures of cats I had printed out.

I wore a shirt with XO's and cartoons of cats and dogs. Also, I made sure when we took our walk that everyone got to play with my sugar glider if they wanted. I hope the day was a nice distraction for anyone who gets sad around Valentine's Day and reminds them that there are still lots of types of love they can give and receive.