HC-One’s Grampian Court Care Home in Peterlee, County Durham visited the Our Lady of the Rosary Primary School to deliver a Dementia Friends session.
On the 24th May, Grampian Court’s Wellbeing Co-Ordinator, Julie McClurey, held a session for thirty Year 4 children and spoke to them about what dementia is and what it’s like living with dementia.
The session began with the children working in groups of three to think of what our brain helps us to do and wrote their answers around a picture of a brain.
In order to explain what happens to the brain when a person has dementia, they used the ‘fairy light’ explanation - each fairy light represents a function of the brain and dementia causes them to flicker, dim or even switch off completely.
Next Julie used the ‘Bookcase Analogy’ to explain how dementia affects someone. The children were able to visualise that as the bookcase rocked and the books fell off the higher shelves, this represented a person’s most recent memories.
To finish off the session, the children were then given a cut up version of the ‘Getting Dressed’ sequence to rearrange in the order that they thought was correct. The purpose of the task was to get them thinking about how difficult this task would be if you were living with dementia when the ‘fairy lights’ in your brain were flicking or were off completely.
Our Lady of the Rosary Primary School’s Teaching Assistant, Susan Wilson commented:
“The feedback from the children regarding Julie’s Dementia Friend session was fantastic and they all learnt a special lesson today.”
Grampian Court’s Home Manager, Judith Tully commented:
“Julie has already established links with Our Lady of the Rosary Primary School and this was the second Dementia Friends session that she carried out at the school. I think that it is great that children have an understanding of what dementia is and what it is like to live with dementia.”