Recommended recreational activities to help seniors enjoy their time in care facilities

Flying Fukuwarai

[New Year Activity] Guaranteed Laughter for Everyone! Flying Fukuwarai!

Some older adults may have played fukuwarai during the New Year holidays.

Fukuwarai is the game where you’re blindfolded and place facial features onto a face, right? Part of the fun is not being able to place the features correctly.

But with “Flying Fukuwarai,” there’s no blindfold.

Instead, you toss large facial feature pieces onto a sheet of paper with a large face drawn on it.

Of course, it still often results in hilariously misplaced features, which makes it exciting.

And because you throw the pieces while looking at the face, it’s said to help train spatial awareness.

Spatial awareness is the ability to perceive positions and shapes within space.

When it declines, people may get lost on familiar routes or bump into things more easily.

Give Flying Fukuwarai a try for a fun brain workout!

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Nakajima Junko

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Clap-along brain training

[Carefully Selected] No More Confusion About Brain Training! 5 Hand-Clap Brain Training Exercises [Senior Fitness]

It’s a game where you keep the beat with handclaps while adding other movements, training your decision-making as you move your body.

Start by inserting simple hand gestures between claps—like raising your thumb or pinky—and then, as you get used to it, gradually expand into movements that involve your whole body.

As these movements combine and become more complex, there’s more to think about, which enhances the brain-training effect.

If you focus too much on the sequence of movements, your motions can become stiff, so it’s also recommended to include some stepping and consciously loosen up your body.

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kappamaki

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Funny Gesture Exercises

Recreation (brain training): Seniors smile and do gesture exercises — recommended for day service programs.

A gesture game where you don’t speak, but watch movements and guess the answer.

Because it’s often played on TV shows and at parties, many older adults may already be familiar with it.

In gesture games, you watch the movements, imagine what they mean, and answer.

Imagining is said to help activate the brain.

What’s more, having older adults perform the prompted actions themselves boosts the brain-training effect.

Since you’re getting older adults to move, it’s like gesture exercise.

Expanding prompts from “eating a mandarin” to “peeling and eating a mandarin” also stimulates the imagination.

Adjust the difficulty to suit the older adults.

The more movements you add, the more smiles you’re likely to see.

Color-Coded Singing Game

Easy! Hilarious and exciting! Color-Coded Singing Game! #Seniors #DayService #MusicRecreation #MusicTherapy

It’s a game where everyone claps to the rhythm while singing, with an added element of judging your own color.

Each person wears a band of their assigned color on their wrist.

When your color is called, you keep clapping; when it isn’t, you stop clapping.

You keep singing even if you stop clapping, and when no color is specified, everyone claps—so it really tests each person’s judgment.

Once everyone gets used to the rules, try speeding up the song to make players decide more quickly whether they should keep clapping.

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kappamaki

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Korokoro Push Game

[Cheerful Rec 🏀] Rolling Push Game #CheerfulManager

It’s a game where you use a stick to keep balls from falling as they roll toward you.

Since the field where the balls roll is far away, your ability to control a long stick that can effectively transfer force to the balls is put to the test.

The rules increase the number of balls gradually over time, which adds a decision-making element about which ball to tap.

It’s a game that can train various skills—judgment, speed, control, and how you apply force—by keeping all these factors in mind.

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kappamaki

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Bamboo Shoot Digging Game

Recreation for seniors: Sit-down paper cup bamboo shoot-digging game #SeniorRecreation #CareRecreation #PaperCups

It’s a game where you use a stick with a paper cup attached to the end to stack and pick up paper cups with bamboo shoots drawn on them, and compete for speed.

The key to successfully picking up the bamboo shoots is to fit the cup on the stick perfectly over the target cup, so your stick control is put to the test.

If you do it well, you can stack multiple cups, so strategy matters—do you carefully stack and grab a bunch at once, or focus on speed and collect them one by one? The longer the stick, the harder it is to control, so adjusting the stick length is also a recommended way to set the difficulty.

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kappamaki

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Gum-Gum Kick Bowling

Elderly recreation: Do it seated! Rubber Kick Bowling #SeniorRecreation #SeatedActivities #Bowling

It’s a game where a newspaper ball is connected to your foot with a rubber band, and you try to kick it to knock down milk-carton pins in front of you.

It tests fine control of your foot—like whether you can bring the ball into a good kicking position and transfer your kicking power effectively.

You can also see individual styles: will you focus on a single, concentrated kick to topple as many pins as possible, or prioritize speed by kicking repeatedly? You can adjust the difficulty by changing the length of the rubber band or the size of the ball, so let’s have people try it in various configurations.