At The Bristal communities, we are committed to enriching the lives of our Reflections residents by providing innovative memory care programming that nurtures connection and engagement. One such offering is our Life Skill Kits - carefully curated collections of familiar items designed to spark reminiscence, encourage conversation, and create meaningful moments. These kits serve as a bridge to the past, allowing residents to reconnect with cherished memories while fostering personal connections with caregivers, family members, and fellow residents. Through sensory exploration and thoughtful conversation, Life Skill Kits offer a comforting and engaging way to celebrate each resident's unique story.
Life Skill Kits at The Bristal: Bridging Memory and Emotion
Life Skill Kits are used to help engage residents, by evoking pleasant memories from their past. These collections of intentionally curated items all relate to a single life theme, with near universal appeal, which may resonate with a resident's personal history or interests. Life Skill Kits provide a meaningful way to help residents connect with their identity and share joyous moments with other residents, team members, and their family.
Team members at The Bristal are specially trained to utilize these kits to initiate a conversation with resident(s). While team members may occasionally and briefly share aspects of their own experience to facilitate a conversation, they are adept at leading the conversation back towards evoking memories and engaging the resident further. Team members will ask yes/no questions or open-ended prompts, and encourage the residents to view, touch, and smell the items to create rich sensory experience for them, including for those residents who may be less verbally communicative.
Example kits include:
Nursery Life Skill Kit
This kit is designed to evoke memories of nurturing and raising children, or sometimes of a resident's own childhood. It includes baby clothes, a life-like baby doll, blankets, children's books, a bottle, baby lotion to smell, baby powder to feel and smell, and nursery rhymes or songs to sing.
Team members may guide residents individually or in groups to reminiscence together by asking questions like:
- Have you ever rocked a baby to sleep?
- Did you have any strange cravings while pregnant?
- Did you ever sing a lullaby? If so, would you sing it for me?
- What was most rewarding about raising children?
- What was the first word your baby said?
- What advice would you give a new parent?
For less verbal residents, the sensory elements included in the kit can create deeply emotional, positive responses, even if words are not easily shared.
Teacher Life Skill Kit
This kit helps residents reconnect with memories of teaching professionally or attending school. It includes chalk and a small chalkboard, books, rulers, a glass apple, and other assorted school-related items.
Conversations may be facilitated with questions such as:
- What made you want to become a teacher? What did you enjoy most about teaching?
- What was your best or your favorite subject in school?
- Do you think recess is important for children?
- How would you describe the school that you attended?
- How much schooling did you attend and why?
- What advice did you give to your students, or would you give to students now, about school, studying, or life in general?
If being used with a small group, some residents may recall their time as students while others may recall their time spent teaching, or remembrances of their children in school. Team members may use exquisite listening and provide positive feedback with verbal responses and body language, to validate everyone's experience and ensure everyone feels included.
Additional Life Skill Kits
The Reflections neighborhood is also stocked with additional Life Skill= Kits to be utilized with residents who may be more inspired by their contents, and more are created as needed to engage specific individuals. The Vanity Life Skill Kit includes beauty and self-care items, such as a make-up brush, silk scarf, perfume bottle, hat box, evening clutch, and hand mirror. It's intended to help evoke memories of special, formal occasions and important events, as well as seminal teenage experiences like their first time wearing make-up. The Sports Life Skill Kit is perfect for sparking memories of athletic achievement or team spirit and includes softballs, a whistle, a baseball cap, and pennants from local sports teams. The Nursing Life Skill Kit, used primarily with those who worked in healthcare, features items like bandages, common medical instruments, tongue depressors, and notebooks. It's designed to help prompt conversations about caregiving and professional pride.
A Place for Connection and Care
The Bristal communities are fully committed to creating enriching experiences for our residents, especially for those receiving memory care. By providing meaningful and engaging experiences with our Life Skill Kits, our team members foster opportunities for residents to reconnect with their identities, share their histories, and deepen new and existing relationships.
