28 Sep 2015
This morning at Young At Heart our theme was ‘Categorising Objects’.
The church hall was very cold when we arrived so, to break with our usual routine, we started by handing out the hot drinks and biscuits to our members. Once everyone was settled in we completed our usual orientation activities, discussed recent news articles and favourite meals.
One of our members had been to visit the poppy exhibit at the Woodhorn Museum in Ashingdon and brought some photographs along to show the group, so we spent time listening to his stories about the display, looking at his photographs, and went on to discuss the larger exhibit that had been at the Tower of London.
For our main activity I had prepared a list of 30 different categories that could be discussed by the group. I started by asking a person to choose any number between 1 and 30 and that would decide our topic.
Our first topic was ‘sport’ so I asked people to share either their favourite sports to watch on TV or any sports they had played at school. The first person said that they had played football for their school, so the other members who had played football were asked to contribute to the discussion. We went around the whole group, so that everyone had chance to contribute to the discussion, and we put the members into groups based on the sports they played at school.
Our second topic was chosen by one of our members who now brings a small doll (baby) to our sessions. The doll didn’t have a name so we came up with our own A-Z of girls names, with everyone contributing to the session. At the end of this topic, our member chose the name ‘Sugar’ for her baby, as that is a name that she already uses, frequently saying “come here sugar” when picking up her doll.
Our final topic was vegetables, so again we went through the alphabet to make our own A-Z list of vegetables. It wasn’t as easy as the A-Z of girls names, but with some creative thinking and some prompts from our volunteers we managed most of the alphabet.
Our theme for next week is ‘orientation’ so we will be discussing places and looking at old local photographs.
