Park Explorations Themed Activities

Park Explorations (in honor of National Park Month)
By Christine Jennings

Learn & Listen – To make any Learn & Listen activity a success you must do some research of your own. I try to make it a little easier by providing websites that have the theme topic information and/or questions to get your discussions started. And as we all know sometimes topics can stray off on a path of their own, which can be the best or funniest Learn & Listen activity ever. Don’t worry if the residents get off topic, but as the closing time for the activity gets close try to pull them back to the theme topic so they will remember what today’s fun theme is all about.
Check out information about National Parks on us-national-parks.net to share with the residents. Get them reminiscing about their family vacations they took to a National Park or even a local State Park. Ask if they took a picnic, hiked a trail or camped out under the stars.

Game – Which Park is this?
Below are the top 10 most visited National Parks. See if your residents can figure them out.
tainsnuom mykos retag (Great Smoky Mountains)
nacnoy radng (Grand Canyon)
demoyeti (Yosemite)
wolstelyeno (Yellowstone)
mypiclo (Olympic)
tainnuom orkcy (Rocky Mountain)
nioz (Zion)
evalye hoaygauc (Cuyahoga Valley)
anrgd toten (Grand Teton)
daiaca (Acadia)

Food – Food for the trail – Let residents make trail mix. There are lots of easy recipes, but if you need one with simple ingredients look on eatbetteramerica.com and in the websites search window enter “trail mix”. It will bring up a list of all trail mix. They have lots of easy mixes to use with most everything you need from your facility kitchen. Let the residents bag some of the trail mix so they can enjoy later in their room.

Exercise – Set up a walking trail to entice the residents to get up, get out and walk. First you will need to map out a waling trail inside and/or outside for your residents to follow. Just like a park map you will have set points of interest for the resident to stop and rest. This can be a rest area in the facility outside the facility. Depending on your residents mobility you can map out laps, ½ mile or mile points. Make sure everyone meets in the normal exercise area to do some stretches before they start to walk. Encourage them to complete the walking course you have set up so they can get their daily exercise in for the day. When they finish their walk remind them to do a few stretches to cool to help them keep limber for the next activity.

Craft – There are so many nature crafts to make that you could Google and find one you want to do with your residents, however I found a site that had some really cool ideas. Allcrafts.net has lots of ideas. Just scroll down and click on Nature Crafts then scroll down to view the list of ideas. One I found that is really a nature project, not a craft is the “Make Rain in a Jar”. I just think it is different and the residents will get a kick out of telling people they made rain. The craft idea I like on this site is the Nature Bracelet. The residents could collect items for their bracelets in the facility garden on in their nature area if you have one. Only you the AD will know which nature craft will be best for your residents and hopefully this site will be a big help to you.

Game – Matching Game – Match the famous site to the National Park it is located in. Write the list of famous site on one side of the board and mix up the park names on the other side. Ask residents to match the site to the park. You can either draw a line from the famous site to the national park or draw a line through each when they have made a match. Here are some I found to get you started and each famous site has one hint to give the residents to help them out and the park site is in the ( ):
• Old Faithful – hint: Wyoming, Montana & Idaho (Yellowstone)
• Frenchman’s Bay – hint: Mt. Desert Island, off the coast of Maine (Acadia)
• The Keys – hint: Florida (Biscayne)
• Yavapai Point – hint: Arizona (Grand Canyon)
• Clingman’s Dome – hint: Tennessee (Great Smoky Mountains)
• The Crater – hint: Island of Maui, Hawaii (Haleakala)
• Going-to-the-Sun-Road – hint: Montana (Glacier)
• Skyline Drive – hint: Virginia (Shenandoah)
• Trail Ridge Road – hint: highest continuous paved road in US. Colorado (Rocky Mountain)
• Sierra Peaks – hint: highest highway pass in California (Yosemite)

You can find more great National Parks to highlight in this game on shannontech.com/ParkVision/Preview/Preview.html or you can Google famous National Parks.

Movie – Any of the National Geographic National Parks movies

To download great themed-related activities, visit Christine's Column at http://www.recreativeresources.com/SpecialEventsandThemes.htm