Welcome to our brand new Creating Conversation kit around the theme of gardening, ideal for those working in Care Homes or Day Care. You may be well into the topics in the Activity Book by now and have questions of your own or you may have made the purchase but need a bit of encouragement to get it out of the box.

We hope this blog will help with a few extra ideas along the way and provide stimulus and inspiration as well as space to give comments and ask or answer questions.

A bit about myself.

I've just recently had more time to commit to gardening and so was excited that it was our first theme for Creative Conversations. What I love about gardening are the possibilities for creativity and the challenge to capture an atmosphere of peace within a garden. I call my garden a sanctuary and would love it if all older people had easy access to such a space where they could help with small gardening projects and just have time to spend outside in nature.

1.

Building confidence

If you sense participants are a bit nervous about getting into creativity, then here's a few tips to help them relax and gain confidence.

Start with a doodle - getting people in to making marks and experimenting with different papers, colours and markers
Write and decorate their name. This is a chance to choose colours and styles and talk about what their name means to them. They could also decorate with their favourite flower or garden item.
Start with a collage - just lingering over magazines and tearing out images and phrases that are meaningful is a great way to introduce a creative activity.
Dots, dashes and lines exercises to have fun - dots that wander, dashes that dance and lines that laugh!
Work as a team or group and set 'jobs' if possible.
A job well done - Always celebrate the work done in each session