Sunny Meadow Care Home

Our story began at Sunny Meadow Care Home, where we met a lady called Vera who was very nervous. It was her very first day living at Sunny Meadow Care Home. She had a small bag of items and her family were delivering her other belongings after she had settled in. 
 

Luckily, some of us has some experience of care homes, and we knew that often the people living there are much older and sometimes they can be a little forgetful. We spoke to Vera so kindly, with respect and understanding. When she said she wanted her room to feel like home, immediately everyone said we can help you. So, whilst Vera went to visit other residents and have some lunch, we began setting up her room…. We even made some of her belongings and added them into our story.

Vera’s room

We invited Vera back to her room and showed her what we had done and she was really happy. She loved our box of items on her dressing table. We made mirrors, perfume, compacts, make up and other home comforts. 

The sign

Sunny Meadow had a sign outside, but it wasn’t very bright and colourful. Together, with teamwork we worked so hard to share small sections of the sign and add bright colours to make the sign much happier and appealing. Look how well our team worked together…

Much better…

Each small section came together to make a beautiful sign. Teamwork and sharing meant we could all make this wonderful piece of art for Sunny Meadow Care Home. We can’t wait to find out what else we can do to help the care home. 

Vera’s forgotten her birthday

When we met with Vera, she seemed upset and worried. She told us she keeps a special book in her handbag and it has important telephone numbers and important birthdays, but when she looked inside, she couldn’t find her own birthday. We asked for permission to contact her children, and Vera said yes. 
 

As Memory Restorers, our role is to help Vera with remembering her forgotten memories. This was our first job! So, we sent Linda, Vera’s daughter a text message. It took a few days for her to reply but she explained that she wanted to check with Sunny Meadow that we were really helping Vera and that we were a responsible team. 
 

We asked Linda a few questions, for example, when is Vera’s birthday? What happened when Vera was 10? And all the other decade milestones. The word decade is new to us, but it’s an important part of our history learning. 
 

Linda sent back a photograph of Vera and her family for each decade. 1935 when Vera was born, all the way to 2025. We also found that Vera’s 90th birthday was 10th October…. And that is VERY soon!!

What do we need to do?

Well, of course our team were very invested in Vera’s birthday, especially as she’d forgotten it and that she was going to be 90! 
 

We had a think about what we needed to do. Here’s some of the things we agreed; a cake, a party, party games, invitations, decorations, a badge, balloons and dancing. 
 

In our art learning, we needed to explore Playful Making. We learnt about art words such as ‘sculpture’, ‘texture’ and ‘three dimensional’. We looked at some famous artist and some artwork. We explored how we could make textures, looked at the shapes the artists had used and talked about the parts we liked. 
 

We then used our sketchbooks to explore this a little further. Once we had looked at some of the skills, we decided to use the idea of playful making and using our own ideas, to help us with our badges for Vera’s 90th. 
 

Have a look at our art journey…

Making decorations 

The next part of our list was decorations. We used left over strips from our care home sign to make paper chains to hang around the care home. 

Invitations

Next, we needed to send out invitations. We looked at ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ to help us with all the information needed. We wrote invitations to Vera’s family and ourselves, then sent them out. 

A problem…

Whilst we were excitedly working our way though party preparations, Linda had been busy sorting Vera’s house. Now Vera lives at the care home, Vera’s family are preparing Vera’s house to be sold. Linda had been looking for photographs to help our team. Sadly, she’d discovered there had been a leak in the loft and many of Vera’s treasured items had become damaged. 
 

Linda was nervous to tell her mum what had happened because she knew it would upset Vera. We used drama to explore the moment Linda told Vera. We thought about what Linda may be feeling and used still images to portray that. We then explored our art word, sculpture, to help represent Vera as she heard the news. We moved Miss Sleem’s arms and head to help sculpt her, as if she were Vera. 
 

Once we’d done that, we were able to play the drama, step into role and see the moment Linda told Vera…

Our next job to do for Vera

When we looked at Vera’s scrapbook, we could see she’d been collecting historical events that were important to her and her family. Each page had historical events and how it had been remembered by her family. 
 

The scrapbook Linda had found was called, ‘1960-1970 Family Scrap Book’ and had been damaged and disorganised. 
 

Vera wanted us to put it back in order. This was important to Vera, but also really helpful for our history learning. What do people remember about the 60s? Let’s find out…

Organising the historical events into chronological order 

Using the captions Vera had written, we matched the photo of the historical event and the captions. The dates were clues for keeping things in order. Lots of us knew about The Beatles, we also knew about Barbie, but were shocked that Ken was introduced over 60 years ago. We recognised Queen Elizabeth in the photograph of England winning the FIFA World Cup. These historical events are all important for our history knowledge, but our concern for Vera’s happinesses made completing this task even more important!

Vera is 90!

It was finally party day. We were so excited and looked forward to it all day. We celebrated with dancing, singing, pass the parcel, party games and sang happy birthday to Vera. We then enjoyed a slice of birthday cake together and wished Vera the happiest birthday. 
 

Have a look at the photos to see how wonderful the party was for us all, especially Vera.

After the party 

After the party, Vera and Linda were talking. Vera was really happy and told Linda that the celebration had helped her recall some fond memories from her past. She remembered some birthday parties she’d had in her childhood, Christmas gatherings, toys she’d played with as a child and magic moments from Linda, Katie and Andy’s childhood. Here are the memories she had…

Linda’s childhood memories 

Linda was really impressed with how the party had helped her mum remember such wondered memories, so she started to share photos with Vera of her own memories of a happy childhood. As Linda shared photos of her favourite toys as a child, Vera began retelling moments she’d remembered, for example the time Andy cut the hair off all of Linda’s trolls and how Linda and Katie were always arguing over the Barbie dolls. Linda felt the joy Vera had for being able to remember. Linda decided she’d look for more special objects or photos to help us with our job as memory restorers.  

Andy’s box of treasured memories 
 

Linda discovered a box belonging to Andy. She brought it to us, and gave us permission to open it.  We looked closely at the box and could see through the gap a picture or a face…

Opening the box

Carefully and respectfully we opened the box and discovered a toy magazine filled with notes that Andy had written. Then we unpacked each item carefully, looking with excitement at all the toys he’d played with as a child. 

The magazine

We spent some time looking through the magazine and were excited to see lots of Andy’s toys were in there. 

Sharing with Vera 

We talked about the moment Linda and Vera share the box and talked about what they might look like, drawing attention to what they may feel, notice, imagine and the actions they may show. These are important parts to our writing curriculum. We then used these ideas to help sculpt two of our friends into the moment Linda shared the box with Vera.