Professional Development---Final Practicum
I was trying to introduction chair volleyball, so that we could form a team and play with another facility, but when that failed to launch, I introduced my residents to noodle hockey. We have played this once and my residents love it.
For this activity, you will need pool noodles cut in half or folded and dowel rods stuck in each end enough for one each player and a beach ball. I set chairs for the residents on facing each other and placed a resident at each end so that they could be goalie. Our facility has a rather large living room area so we used the living room. This is a good place to have this game for our residents when we need to be indoors. When we play this outdoors, we will have a rather large courtyard with a sidewalk that runs down the middle, the chairs will be set on either side of the sidewalk.
This activity really fits my residents, in that it allows them to be competitive and work as a team. It also promotes exercise. It also comes with lots of laughter.
I would like to do a variation of this activity in the summer with a quart size ice cream ball down the sidewalk. I am in the process of looking for hockey sticks that can be cut down to fit the residents from a sitting. In order to achieve this variation, we would need to have the ice cream ball, rock salt, milk or heavy cream, the add ins for the flavor of ice cream that we want to make. I was going to try this in the winter when the facility wanted to celebrate national strawberry ice cream day but when I tried it at home, the condensation off the ball would have been too much for the carpets in the building, so it was decided that this was a summer activity.
