We’re in the home stretch working through our summer bucket list, and we just completed an item on the list – the nursing home service project!  I know how much the residents of assisted living and nursing homes love to see kids, so I thought it would be neat for my kids to make and hand out cards to them.

Making Cards for the Nursing Home

I wanted to keep the cards postcard-size and pretty simple for my 4 and 2 year old children to color.  I thought the free printable cards on Highlights.com were cute and kid-like.  They’re made to print one per page and be folded into a card.  But using my trusty old Paint program (included in Windows), I copied/pasted the cute designs to print four-to-a-page.  You can see one of the pages that my children colored below before I cut them apart.

I also thought these flower coloring cards from MakeBreaks.com would be pretty regardless of how my children colored on them.  Again, this is designed to print one to a page, so I used the basic Paint program on my computer to copy and paste the design to print four-to-a-page.

I joined in on the coloring myself, as you can see!

And here’s a page that my son colored.  He’s likes to color outside the lines, if you can’t tell!

I wrote simple messages on the backs of the cards to brighten their day.

Delivering Cards to the Nursing Home

We ended up making over 30 cards for this nursing home service project, some of which are shown below.  It seemed like a lot, but since both of my kids sometimes wanted to hand a card to the same resident, we only had about 5 extra cards at the end.  So it worked out perfectly!

We visited our local assisted living home mid-afternoon, which worked great.  We saw a good number of residents in the hallways, where it was easy to chat and give them a card.  If someone’s room door was open and we could see them sitting in a chair inside, we’d knock and ask if we could come in to deliver a card.  We also went to the common room just before bingo began, which was a great spot to catch a lot of residents.

I didn’t want to snap any photos of the residents, so I’m afraid I don’t have much to show in the way of delivery.  But here are my kids holding some cards at the front of the assisted living home.

My kids are shy, but even though they didn’t say much, they still put smiles on the residents’ faces.  It was neat to see!  I highly recommend taking an afternoon to do this nursing home service project yourself!  Decorate and deliver cards and spread some cheer to your local assisted living or nursing home!

P.S. Check out these other kid-friendly service projects – law enforcement appreciation bags, book drive, and firefighter appreciation gifts.