Halloween Sensory Experience Brings Fun and Creativity to Care
Halloween is all about ghosts, ghouls and fun. The Jothno Care team created ‘JL’s haunted mansion’ for halloween to provide sensory stimulation for a service user.
Sensory stimulation is important - it strengthens brain connections, helps with emotional regulation and aids cognitive and motor skills development. There are many ways to stimulate the senses - seeing colour and shiny sparkles or twinkling lights, touching the texture of shapes, hearing the crinkle of foils and paper decorations, laughter and merry making, smelling and tasting delicious food.
All of these were brought into play by the care team to make this a special night that the young lady will not forget any time soon. The carers decked the house outside and in with lashings of cautionary keep out tape, draped walls, doors and ceilings with ghostly gauze and creepy spiders to make walking through the house tricky and tactile. Twinkling pumpkin fairy lights and shiny foil spiders and trick or treat witch hat balloons were a visual treat. As were glow in the dark face masks.
Dracula decorations, skeletons hanging in the hallway, aliens crawling out the fire alarm, even the bathroom got the spooky ghoul seat and caution tape treatment, all adding to the fun and laughter that could be heard throughout the house. Handmade decorations of ghosts that were given fun names and paper spider webs brought in a touch of creativity. And everyone had their face painted in halloween style - another example of touch. As always, healthy (and culturally appropriate) food was catered.
The care team also created a fun video of the whole event complete with stormy night and spooky laughter sound effects. The event demonstrates the lengths that the carers will go to to provide fun and creative sessions with a service user. Sharif Ahmed, owner of Jothno Care & Support says “our carers are very engaged with their wards and show lots of enthusiasm and creativity when working on these types of sessions. As a company, we encourage this as everyone benefits.”
We are constantly planning the next event that will happen. Over the last few months we have celebrated Mexico, Diwali, Halloween and more with our clients. We are now looking forward to making the festive season as fun-filled as possible. Our care teams are much like a family. We’re aware of what makes events like these special for our wards and tailor each one to the individual’s needs.
