Dementia Activities for Seniors: What to Do Together When Words Get Hard

If you visit a parent with dementia regularly, you probably know how the first ten minutes go. You say hello, hand over whatever you brought and ask how she’s doing. She says fine. You ask whether she remembers the neighbor who used to bring over tomatoes every August, and she clearly doesn’t, and you can both feel it. After that the conversation runs on small talk until it runs out, usually long before the visit does.

Most of us ask “do you remember” questions because they seem like a kind way to reach someone. We want to bring back something good. But when memory is slipping, the question can land as a test, and every answer she can’t find makes the next question harder to face. You may notice your parent getting quieter as the visit goes on. Often that isn’t because she doesn’t want company. Talking has simply started to feel like something she keeps getting wrong.

What helps is moving the visit away from recall and toward something you can do together. The Alzheimer’s Association puts the principle simply:

“Focus on enjoyment, not achievement.”

— Alzheimer’s Association

Its own example is folding towels. It doesn’t really matter whether the towels end up folded properly. What matters, in the Association’s words, “is that you were able to spend time together, and that the person feels as if he or she has done something useful.”

Give your hands something to do

Conversation gets much easier when you sit next to each other working on something instead of facing each other across a table. Pauses stop feeling like failures, because the puzzle fills them.

Jigsaw puzzles are the most familiar choice, but an ordinary 1,000-piece puzzle is usually too much. Look for large pieces and a lower count. QUOKKA’s dementia puzzles range from 13 pieces up to 100, so you can choose for how your parent is doing now rather than a year ago. It’s better to start too easy than too hard. The Travel Memories set is a good example of what to look for: three 100-piece puzzles of places, a few cards with facts about them and a larger card with questions to talk over once the picture comes together.

Search-and-find puzzles give the activity a second part. In the Retro set, after you finish each of the four pictures, you look for small details hidden and repeated around the scene. For someone who struggles to find words, pointing at something and hearing “you found it” is a real exchange.

Choose activities without a wrong answer

Plenty of adults freeze in front of a blank sheet of paper, and dementia can make that worse. Water painting gets around it. The picture is already on the page, and when you brush water over it, the colors appear. There’s no paint to spill and nothing to get wrong.

QUOKKA’s water painting sets come with ten pictures and a brush, in themes like farm life, flowers, birds and forests. The sheets can be painted again once they dry. It’s worth picking a theme that connects to your parent’s life: the farm set for someone who grew up in the country, the flowers for a gardener.

Let familiar words carry the conversation

Families often notice that a parent who can’t recall what she had for lunch can still finish “an apple a day…” without a pause. Sayings we’ve repeated all our lives tend to stay with us longer than recent names and events.

You probably didn’t have to tap to know the endings. Neither will she.

A card game built on those phrases turns that into an easy way to talk. The Figures of Speech memory game has 202 large-print cards and two difficulty levels. You read the beginning of a saying, and your parent finishes it. It feels more like singing along than being quizzed. If a phrase doesn’t come, finish it together and move on to the next card.

Ask for stories, not facts

The way you word a question makes a big difference. “Do you remember your first job?” has a right answer, so it can be answered wrong. “Tell me about a job you liked” doesn’t, and it leaves your parent room to share whatever comes to mind.

Researchers call this kind of storytelling reminiscence, and it has been studied fairly closely. A 2018 Cochrane review of 22 studies with nearly 2,000 people living with dementia found modest benefits. One-on-one sessions were probably linked to a slight improvement in mood, and group sessions to slightly better communication. The effects are small, but they point the same way as common sense: people tend to feel better when someone is interested in their life.

If you’re not sure where to start, prompt cards help. QUOKKA’s Conversation Cards for Seniors has 160 large-print questions in four themes: Bonds, Journeys, Echoes and My Rituals. Read one aloud and listen. If the story comes out differently from last time, let it. The details matter much less than the telling.