7 Inexpensive Activities for Seniors with Dementia

People with dementia gradually lose cognitive abilities such as thinking, remembering, and reasoning, which interferes with daily life activities and motivation. Activities tailored to the interests and abilities of a person with dementia can positively impact lives while reducing agitation and minimizing behavioral symptoms.

Dementia-friendly activities can help minimize the rate of cognitive decline by allowing people to stay active in ways that are appropriate for them. Thus, to help you keep your loved ones busy and actively engaged, we are sharing fun, meaningful activities that are:

• Simpler: Patients with dementia need less complex things and require less’ figuring out. This is all incorporated into the following activities.
• Adult-oriented: The activities listed below use themes from everyday adult life, which help stimulate memories and provide opportunities for reminiscing.
• Just Right Challenge: The best dementia activities give mental stimulation for dementia patients without being too challenging. In this article, we provide a range of activities to keep people engaged at all stages of dementia.
• Help for Caregivers: The following activities can be completed by the person with dementia more independently, requiring less dementia caregivers supervision while reducing their burden.

“Seniors with Dementia Need Engagement and Fun”

Sort It Game:

Begin with five to seven brightly colored buttons of varying shapes and sizes and similar colored cups. Ask your older adults to sort the buttons and place them in glasses of matching colors. Do not hurry or interrupt residents. Encourage them and lend a helping hand when necessary.

A Mystery Bag:

You will need a cloth bag and various shaped objects for this activity! Begin by having the person observe the different shapes for a few moments. Once they’ve mastered the shapes, you can progress to the next step! Place the various shapes inside the bag and instruct the person to reach them, feel, and verbally state whether the shape is a cube or a rectangle as they take the object out.

Make a Bouquet:

Arranging flowers in a vase is a perfect activity for someone who enjoys flowers and their scent. Purchase some low-cost artificial flowers or assist in creating paper flowers for the aging adult to use in a vase arrangement, create a garland, or even door décor. Your senior citizen will enjoy making their arrangements.

Happy Memory Bag:

Fill the bag with mementos from their youth. Scents and memory are inextricably linked. Thus, include their favorite perfume, holiday scents like gingerbread, and other meaningful items.

Make a Collage or Scrapbook:

Contact the aging adults’ relatives to learn about their fond memories. Collect and cut out old family photos. Allow your dementia-affected family member to arrange the pictures to form a memory scrapbook.

Try Simple Crafts:

Making easy DIY crafts gives the person with dementia a sense of satisfaction & accomplishment. The opportunity to see it ‘in use’ provides the activity with meaning.

• Make bead necklaces
• Decorate a bird feeder
• Stack up party cups
• Create a word board
• Decorate Sugar Cookies

Activities for the later stages of Dementia

Activities in the later stages of dementia should be simplified and should focus on the senses, such as:

• Sight: Look at family photo albums.
• Hearing: Foster emotional connections via the music of their era.
• Touch: Provide colorful sensory books to look at and touch.
• Taste: Offer them their favorite easy-to-digest food.
• Smell: Give your client a hand massage with fragrant lotion or oil.

Conclusion

Dementia has a variety of effects on people. Rather than focusing on the disease and its impact, we should rather seek to identify aging adults’ strengths and remaining abilities and find activities to support them at their best.

Related blog posts: