While on placement un a mental health setting I was able to spend time with a group of people with different illnesses, who met once a week to socialise. My supervisor had organised a weekly games to enhance the group’s social skills, build teamwork and have fun. The group ranged in age and ability and we were able to cater for everyone we started every session with an easy warm up, this was designed to be fun and interactive.
I have found this youtube clip to show that warm ups can be fun, you lay down some cones in a big circle and tell everyone to skip round, you make one person the tagger, when they tag someone they link arms and then head off to tag some else, making a bigger chain until there is no one left to tag. Everyone has fun and gets there body ready for exercise.
After a bit of a warm up we split up into two groups this can also be made fun as well, as I mentioned earlier we had people of different ability and age so we made sure that the people who knew or thought they were good got put into a team last, this raised morale.
When the teams were picked we had a variety of sports that we adapted to make them more fun and interactive. This video shows that you can adapt sports to accommodate anyone.
We never kept score and made sure the person who had scored the point/ goal got special recognition to increase their self efficacy. In this video you can see the different ways to celebrate. Although this took rehearsal that we didn’t do but a simple high five or back pat is sufficient and we also remembered to acknowledge the person who set the goal up.
Sport is a great way to socialise and gain social skills helping people with a variety of mental illness. It allows people to express themselves and has some fun. A person can enjoy sport no matter what their ailment it just takes some modification or determination to help the person in the 3rd video we saw that able bodied people where able to play alongside wheelchair users the last video demonstrates this, through determination people are able to achieve amazing feats.
Thank you for reading blog and watching my videos, people’s love of sport allows them to push for new technology in order to reach new limitations of their ability. People in mental health settings gain new skills, express themselves and most importantly expand social networks.
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