[For Seniors] Guaranteed to Be a Hit! Popular Day Service Recreational Activities

Flying Fukuwarai

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

Some older adults may have played Fukuwarai during the New Year, right? Fukuwarai is the game where you put facial parts on a face while blindfolded.

Part of the fun is that you can’t place the pieces correctly.

But in “Flying Fukuwarai,” you don’t use a blindfold.

Instead, take a sheet with a large face drawn on it and throw large facial parts onto it.

Of course, this version also often ends up with pieces placed hilariously wrong, which makes it lively.

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

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

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

Try Flying Fukuwarai for some fun brain training!

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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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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.

Hard-to-pull nails, nails that are difficult to remove, nails pulled out with a nail puller

“A nail that’s hard to pull out, a nail that’s difficult to draw out, a nail pulled with a nail puller”—this tongue-twister also brings to mind scenes of carpenters or families doing DIY at home.

You can really picture someone struggling to pull out a stubborn nail.

Because of that, it repeats the same or similar words quite a lot.

It might be easier to say if you consciously break it into words like: hard-to-pull, nail; hard-to-draw-out, nail.

It’s a tongue-twister that may even help older adults recall their own DIY experiences.

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Nakajima Junko

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Warabi Mochi in Anmitsu Style

Oyachube! “Anmitsu-style Warabi Mochi”

Warabi-mochi has a jiggly, gelatinous texture in your mouth.

It’s often dusted with kinako (roasted soybean flour), but topping it with matcha or drizzling it with kuromitsu (brown sugar syrup) is also delicious.

Warabi-mochi is made with warabi starch, though using warabi starch can sometimes result in a slightly firmer texture.

Try some tweaks, like using a store-bought kit that yields softer warabi-mochi, or making a soft version with potato starch (katakuriko).

You can also turn it into an anmitsu-style dessert by adding sweet red bean paste and fruit, then drizzling kuromitsu on top.

It transforms warabi-mochi into a more festive Japanese sweet than usual, and it’s likely to be enjoyed by older adults as well.

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Nakajima Junko

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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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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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