Okay, so we're gonna start an activity. How do we do it? Right? Because a lot of people will just tell me, oh, my loved one just likes to sleep, or my residents just want to watch TV. Nobody, nobody wants to do anything. Here's the bottom line.

People living with dementia will will watch TV or sleep all day, if you block them. You can't let them sleep or watch TV all day, you need to come with a plan. If you don't have a plan, they don't have a plan. Most people living with dementia don't really have the skills necessary at that point to create and begin and initiate an activity by themself, or at least not something that you want them to be doing. Right. So you need to be the one to come up with the plan.

And I know you're thinking I've already come up with a million plans. Rachel, I don't want to come up with any more plans. Don't worry. I'm going to give you some great ideas during this presentation. Okay. Here's what you're going to use, you're going to say to someone and I think I mentioned this earlier in this class.

Can you help me? Ask people for help? Not? Do you want to help me not? Do you want to do this thing? Or you know, whatever you need to say, can you help me because when you ask someone if they can help you, you make them feel important.

You make them feel necessary and useful and independent. Suddenly, they feel like this person needs me. And you can use this with almost any situation. So even if you're giving somebody a shower, and they're not getting in the shower, you're thinking, Oh, man, I really like Why is this not working? Right? Ask them if they can help you.

Can you help me wash your face? I'm going to wash your legs at the same time. What did you used to like to do? I say this because sometimes if you ask someone living with dementia, oh, what do you like to do? They'll say nothing. Because either they can't think of what they want to do, it's too much of an open ended question.

Or sometimes I've gotten even the response. Well, I used to do X, Y, and Z. But now I can't anymore because of my arthritis or etc, etc. So you really want to say, What do you used to do? And usually the sparks a great conversation so you can tailor activities based on their likes and dislikes. What do you think about this?

This is the question we're going to use when we're introducing a baby doll, or stuffed animal. And I'll show you some pictures of this in a little bit. When we're introducing a baby doll or stuffed animal. We do not want to assume that the person thinks is real and we do not want to assume that the person thinks it is not real, which is why we let them guide us to where their reality is, right. So we're gonna say, what do you think about this? And right away, you're going to know if they believe it's real or not.

And then we're going To embrace that reality, the two step rule, but the two step rule is really anything more than two steps is too hard. This also goes for instructions if you're saying like, Okay, alright, today we're gonna go do this and then we're gonna go that then we're gonna go here, then we're gonna do this thing. It's like whoa, too much information, break it down. My favorite activities like my favorite arts and crafts activities are always two steps. I love painting, mini birdhouses with people living with dementia. It almost always goes well.

And it's two steps. Put paint on paintbrush, put paint brush on birdhouse, right? You can see it's not abstract. It's very simple. It is two steps. We also need to adjust for level meaning like where are they at with their dementia and also what were their skills beforehand.

Someone who was a wonderful Baker, you know Decades ago hasn't lost all of that. I had a resident wants named Linda. I loved Linda. Linda was a lot of fun. She was in an earlier stage of dementia, and very, very high functioning individual. She was also a very accomplished woman.

And she'd been a teacher for years. And eventually, when she retired, she wasn't like an event planner. So she would go and plan people's, you know, fundraisers and things like that. So when Christmas rolled around, and we had to decorate the tree, Well, to be honest, I'd never really decorated a tree. I mean, like kind of helped my mom do it when I was younger, but I lived in an apartment, I was still kind of transients. You know what I mean?

I was I was living all over the place at different times in my life. I was pretty young in my early 20s. and was like, I don't think I've ever decorated a tree by myself. So I started decorating this tree and ask Linda if she could help me and I quickly noticed that every time I Put an ornament on the tree, Linda would look at me and see if I was looking away and if I was looking away she would like take it and move it to a different spot. So she didn't like my decorating skills. So I just said, You know what, Linda, I'm gonna leave you to this.

And she did a wonderful job and did WAY WAY better job than me, you know, without dementia could ever have done okay. We also want to adjust for profession. Linda's have wonderful example of this as well since she had been a teacher and was an event planner, she was always in charge of people making plans, you know, I would get her involved by asking her to help me round everybody up. This was really successful because a lot of times I would ask her to come do something with me and she would say oh, well Honey, I'm so busy. I you know, I have XY and Z going on. So what I would do is Linda, you know, I have this, I have this thing coming up.

I need your help. You know, I've got so many people I need to gather and she was like, Oh, don't worry about it. And next thing you know know everybody's where I need them to be. Bingo Isn't that great? So especially if you if your loved one lives in a community setting or if you work in a community setting, I really want to emphasize that like, bingo is not the best activity. I mean, people really do enjoy bingo, it gets very intense, especially in assisted living environments.

But it should not be like the go to every day. Nobody should be doing bingo every day. Pinterest, if you don't know what Pinterest is, it is a website where people can quote unquote, pin images, craft ideas, baking ideas, home long hair, all this like anything crafty that they want to do. They can keep put on their little individual sites. So just look up www.pinterest.com and you can actually look up my link. I will link it for you here.

And oh, yeah, you can go check out my site. I have a lot of great craft ideas, things. I've tried things that have worked well. When I've worked in assisted living environments with my residents who have dementia, I want to take a note take a moment to mention what is called learned helplessness. And this is something that's a phrase I believe is current coined by the psychologist Martin Seligman years ago. And it is this idea that we can learn to be helpless.

Now, this was mostly used to apply to individuals living with major depression. But I like to apply it in dementia as well, because I feel like we can teach people that they can't do stuff. And if you teach somebody that they can't do stuff, well, now they're not gonna do anything, right. So if you're constantly getting your loved one ready in the morning, and you're putting their shoes on for them, right, you're buttoning up their coat and you're putting their hat on and you're doing all these things. They're being done upon, right? So they're not really participating in any of this.

We want to make sure that people are participating not only in their care, but in their activities. You know, they're not just sitting there in front of TV. Besides staring at it all day, I mean, that's a great way to teach somebody that like, they don't matter and that they can't really add anything. So we want to make sure we're not teaching people to be helpless. So this is something that's my one of my favorite things to do. And that I don't get to do too, too often.

Is do Environmental Design in Dementia Care communities. If you hear somebody meowing that is my cat shoes. It's Yeah, she's, she's tough. Um, so here's the nursery. And we want to remember to ask someone living with symmetric. What do you think about this when we're introducing a baby doll?

Some tips on baby dolls? It's helpful to buy a doll that doesn't have a mouth open because sometimes people will try to feed the babies. That's okay. Right? If somebody is feeding a baby and they're not focused on their own meal, we can come up and say, Oh, the baby needs to go down for a nap here. Let me let me take the baby for a nap.

While you eat, right, so that's a pretty easy fix. I love building like cribs and all this stuff in care community settings and really you can do this in your house as well. It doesn't need to be in a you know, assisted living or anything like that. You can really designate a space for the baby. You don't have to get a whole crib, but designate a room where the baby takes the baby's nap, right? I mean, you really, you really want to live in this reality and this is part of this right you really want to live in the reality.

I also like dolls that are serve a certain size, a certain weight. I think I linked that for Amazon as well. So you can go on Amazon, you can find a baby all pet shop. I also look at setting up pet shops and again something you can do at your house in assisted living wherever. I love memorable pets. This is where I get most of my stuffed animals.

They're actually built for people living with dementia. You can buy pets from joy for joy for all pets, which was an offshoot of Hasbro, and those pets, meow and bark and do stuff like that these guys don't do anything and I kind of like it that way. I think it's a little bit simpler. And to be honest, they're a little bit easier to clean because they're not robotic. So I really recommended I again, I send up put up a link on the site here for memorable pets. And we want to make sure of course that we're saying to someone, what do you think about this when introducing a pet, not just assuming that they think it's real or not.

I've seen wonderful, wonderful, wonderful things come from using the pets and the baby dolls. Someone who is very agitated and anxious can really be calmed by taking care of a baby. Right? They feel important, they feel useful, they feel needed to be a really wonderful thing. Activity boxes. So again, this could be used in assisted living, this could be used in your own house, it doesn't really matter.

I really recommend creating these boxes and ahead of time, so you're good to go. So in the middle of the day when you're like, oh man, what do I do with this person, they're kind of following me around and I need you to get something done. set them up with an activity, right? items to sort things to fold flowers to arrange boxes to like hunt through to find stuff in them, things to stack, really any like repetitive little activity that you can use during the day. That doesn't require a lot of setup. It's already done.

It's easy to clean up. Not a lot of that you need to do chores almost anyone can do. And people say to me, oh, why don't want to make my loved one with dementia do any work. You're really making them do any work. You're actually engaging them in a really useful way. They don't have to technically be doing something that helps you, but it's helping them because they're engaged.

They feel important. I mean, I hate I hate doing laundry. Because every time I do laundry, there's just More laundry. And I don't I mean, it doesn't even make any sense. It just appears right. But when the laundry is done, at least for those first 10 minutes, I think I feel good, right?

Okay, it's done. I feel like I feel accomplished. So here are some chores, folding towels, sorting socks. And note, I think baby socks here because at least in my experience, when I've had normal size person, socks, adult socks, all of my socks go missing and they end up on everybody's feet. So I like baby socks, arranging flowers, washing or drying dishes, setting the tables, sweeping wiping down surfaces. These are all things that are already at your house already at the care community.

Simple, easy stuff that you could ask someone for help with. So this is a little bit of a note here if you have a loved one with a husband very interesting profession. Especially people who have like kind of like a trade nursing teaching accounting tradesmen security guard, like somebody had something that was very like specific For example, all of the nurses that I've ever had, who are retired and have dementia, they always think they're still working. So guess what I do? I go out and I get a stethoscope, and I bring back a bunch of stethoscopes. And I give all my retired nurses some stethoscopes, and they walk around and they give people advice and, you know, they check.

They check people's oxygen, they check people's Paul's, I mean, you know, that's just what they do, and that is totally fine. They feel like they're still at work. That's awesome. Let people continue to be helpful and useful and important. If you have someone who was a hair, a hairdresser, okay, so go get a bunch of wigs, you know, let them break down, let them get those wigs and you know, cut them and break them down to whatever they want to be. Anything we I we had a guy once who was an elevator engineer, so all that the community does was given a clipboard and his mug of coffee and he would stand in front of their elevator, like all day and make notes.

Watch it. I mean, this was his idea of a good time, he felt like he was important. He felt, I'm doing something important. This is my job. And that gave me a lot of satisfaction. So I really recommend finding activities that fit the person more than just like what you think they should be doing.

I have a link for a bunch of different crafting ideas. And again, I'm going to send you to my Pinterest page so you can check it out. With different crafts and ideas you can do