e-Learning Courses

New downloadable education opportunity from Wiser Now

Over the past 20+ years, I have written approximately 50 wide-ranging courses directed primarily at activity professionals for Activity Connection, most of which are still on sale on their website (https://activityconnection.com/product-category/elearning-courses/). Now, for the first time, as you can see from the list below, I am offering some of them on this site.

Anyone who completes these courses through Activity Connection is eligible upon taking the post-test for (usually) 4 CEUs from the National Association of Activity Professionals (NAAP).  But if you don’t need the CEUs, and don’t want to take a post-test, you can take the exact same courses, jam-packed with useful information, at the significant cost reduction of just $15/course. The exception is the new Dementia Programming course, which due to its format and increased length, is $20. FYI, courses providing CEUs are more expensive because NAAP charges a significant annual fee to providers for each course.

Here is a list of the courses I am currently offering.

• Coloring for Adults
• Community Service: You’re Never Too Old to Make a Difference
• Creating Family Partnerships, Part 1
• Creating Family Partnerships, Part 2
• Dementia Programming
• Going Clubbing
• Nature’s Flora Fun
• Team Building for Activity Professionals
• Time Management for Activity Professionals

Below are descriptions of all of the above courses. If you have other topics in mind, chances are good that I have already a course for it, so please send your request to Kathy@WiserNow.com.

Coloring for Adults

This course addresses:

• The health benefits of coloring
• What to color
• What to color on
• What to color with
• Online coloring
• Specialty coloring, such as various free-forms and Zentangles
• Complementary activity examples
• Resources

Community Service: You’re Never too Old to Make a Difference

This course addresses:

• The benefits of volunteering for volunteers and the benefits to your organization of using volunteers
• Planning and brainstorming
• Creating a varied and inclusive volunteer service within your organization
• Some advice on volunteer fundraising projects
• Recruiting outside volunteers
• Training volunteers
• Enhancing the experience of volunteers
• Rewarding volunteers
• Continuing to evaluate and revise your volunteer program
• Resources
• Appendix of specific activities

Creating Family Partnerships, Part 1

The single most important thing to understand when trying to build relationships with families of new residents in residential care settings is that those family members are experiencing loss and grieving for what once was. This course will provide the professional caregiver with many suggestions about how to assure the prospective resident and family caregiver that they are making the right decision. It will also give tips on making move-in day go as smoothly as possible.

Creating Family Partnerships, Part 2

After a new resident has moved in, it’s important to keep the family members as involved as they would like to be, not only so that they feel comfortable in your community, but so that their needs continue to be served. This course will give you many ideas for involving family members with residents. It will also give you suggestions for making the resident feel at home following move-in day.

Dementia Programming

While aimed at educating activity professionals, this course will also benefit personnel in day care and home health settings as well as family caregivers.

• Part 1 briefly covers delirium, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB), Vascular dementia, and Frontotemporal dementia.
• Part 2 covers normal aging changes + hints for adapting programming for dementia.
• Part 3 covers a variety of types of activities that tend to be adaptable to people living with dementia, IF you are willing to bend the rules, and notes some activities likely to be less successful with many people as their dementia progresses.
• Part 4 covers the many ways you can use Activity Connection content for engaging people living with dementia, some ways to use Wiser Now content, plus game ideas from the Creative Brain Games blog, and a bunch of other resources that have potential for people living with dementia of various types in various stages of progression.

End-of-Life Care, Memorial Services, and Moving On

This course covers:

• Creating a good death in residential care settings
• Supporting families and staff as end-of-life nears
• Ways to honor the life of the person who died
• Moving on

Defining a “good death” has multiple elements. They include:

• Making the dying person comfortable and at ease, and as much as possible, honoring the dying person’s wishes related to where he/she will die
• Helping the family cope
• Supporting the staff

Going Clubbing

According to staff at the Mayo Clinic, “Good friends are good for your health. Friends can help you celebrate good times and provide support during bad times. Friends prevent loneliness and give you a chance to offer needed companionship, too.” The purpose of our Going Clubbing course is to help you help others form clubs and classes to foster friendships. Here you will find lots of ideas for forming five types of groups. They include those related to:

• Common subject interests, such as photography, travel, gardening, and bird watching
• Lifelong learning classes for studying things like art history or music appreciation
• Exercise that goes beyond sitting in a chair and doing leg lifts
• Common social interests, such as going to a ball game or the theater or playing cards
• Service that continues the work of existing clubs, such as Kiwanis and Rotary, or begins a new club for specific projects

Nature’s Flora Fun

This course addresses flora rather than fauna: Nature programming ideas focused on plants (flora), rather than animals is a vast topic, that cannot be comprehensively addressed in a short course, but here you will find loads of suggestions related to:

• The benefits of time spent in Nature and with Nature
• Getting out in Nature
• Gardening options
• Bringing Nature indoors in multi-sensory ways
• Nature programming ideas for trivia quizzes, word games, reminiscence and imaginative exercises, discussion topics and resources available through Activity Connection and Wiser Now
• Additional resources
• An Appendix of specific activities

Team Building for Activity Professionals

The first rule for building great teams is to have fun together.  Sometimes working successfully together comes from sharing a traumatic event, but more often it’s simply sharing our workdays and the ordinary joys and challenges we face. Positive experiences build strong teams. In this course, humor and play have prominent roles.

This course mainly covers:

• Why teambuilding is important
• Identifying your team(s), including various groups
• Choosing partners, dividing into teams
• Getting to know team members
• Characteristics of effective teams
• Skills of effective team leaders including conflict resolution
• Many examples of ways to make teambuilding fun – woven throughout the course and in an appendix
• Resources

Time Management for Activity Professionals

This course covers:

• The benefits of time management
• The challenges you face as Activity Professionals
• 6 Common time management mistakes
• Time management tips and solutions