24 Aug 2015

Before we began with our theme for the session we went through our usual greeting process and discussed recent news stories. The 2 stories that were discussed this week were the funeral of Cilla Black, which took place last week, and the tragic air show accident from the weekend.

Today at Young At Heart the theme of our session was ‘faces and places’.

In preparation for the session I researched the 10 most popular tourist sites in the world, collected pictures and created a printed picture quiz along with a presentation detailing the name and location of each place. The ‘places’ list included the Statue of Liberty in New York, The Taj Mahal in India and the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

I also created a printed a picture quiz of 10 of the 20 most recognised faces according to a list in the Telegraph newspaper. The ‘faces’ list included ex-US President George Bush, Princess Diana and the man who could “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” Muhammad Ali (also known as ‘The Greatest’ and Cassius Clay).

Everyone completed their own places and faces quiz sheet and then we reviewed and discussed the answers as a group. When discussing the ‘places’ the group were asked if they had ever been to that place on holiday, if they had seen the ‘place’ and if they would like to see it. Through this discussion we found that a few members of the group were very well travelled, while others hadn’t travelled far. 

One member of the group could not remember the name of the Taj Mahal but could remember that Princess Diana was photographed outside of it prior to her split with Prince Charles. This led to a short discussion about they marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles and the rumours that had been circulating at the time of the split. 

When discussing the famous ‘faces’ part of the quiz we asked the group who the person was, where they were born and whether or not they were fans. After we marked the quiz we asked the group to identify anything that some of the people had in common (there were 3 pairs) and which ones were the odd ones out. After this we put the cards in the order of attractiveness and then in order of age (if they were all alive) from youngest to oldest.

Feedback from the group at the end was very positive and the group identified how much fun the discussions had been. If I ran a session like this in the future I think I would like to use some software to slightly alter the appearance of the faces in a fun way to see if the group could still recognise each person. It would be good to let members of the group alter the faces using an app on the iPad to alter the appearance so that they can see how their faces can be altered.

There is no Young At Heart next week as it is a Bank Holiday on Monday, we return on Monday 7th September at 10am, when the theme of our session will be word associations.

I hope you have a restful Bank Holiday weekend and cannot wait to hear what you have been up to when we return in 2 weeks.