Intergenerational Week 2021

Happy Intergenerational Week! Here at the Corn Exchange we love bringing people from different generations together and helping them to build collaborative and creative relationships.

There are so many benefits to participating in intergenerational activities; from tackling stereotypes about ageing to increasing respect and understanding to combating social isolation and learning new skills together. People of all ages can learn new things together.

In the last three years, the Learning and Participation team at the Corn Exchange have launched three new Intergenerational initiatives: Words Together, Intergenerational Memory Cafés and Making Music Making Friends.

In Words Together, primary and secondary school children visit care homes with a professional poet and develop their own poetry and creative writing around their shared life experiences. In Intergenerational Memory Cafés, hosted at the Corn Exchange, we bring out the inner child in our participants with dementia and their families by playing games, singing songs and acting out stories with a group of four year olds. And finally, in Making Music Making Friends, we take Reception classes from local primary schools into care homes over the course of six weeks to six months and build relationships between the children and the residents, creating drawings of each other, swopping stories and making music together.

Intergenerational work has been disproportionally impacted by Covid-19 so it’s more important than ever to raise awareness about the benefits of working intergenerationally and get projects like these up and running as soon as possible!

Becci, Early Years and Education Co-ordinator