Residents at Brighterkind’s Ross Court Care Home, in Ross-on-Wye, decided to design and make their own kites to celebrate this year’s International Kite Festival on January 6th, which the staff and residents very much enjoyed.

The festival, which runs until 14th January and is called Uttararyan in Hindi, started in Gujarat in India in 1989 and signifies the end of winter and the days becoming longer.

People from all over the world take part and showcase their hand-crafted kites and kite-flying skills.

Magic Moments Club Coordinator, Clare Lockley, unwrapped the kite craft kits and they drew their own designs.

Resident, Peter Aston, decided on a pirate’s skull and cross bones design, while Peter Stock thought a kite drawn on a kite would make an interesting design.

Another resident, Phyllis, coloured in a beautiful butterfly on her kite.

Clare said: “We had great fun getting creative and really enjoyed reminiscing about kite-flying in our younger days which brought back lovely memories of beach holidays and days in the park. “We even had a group rendition of ‘Let’s go fly a kite’ from the film Mary Poppins!

“Once our wonderful kites were finished we took them outside - it was a lovely sunny afternoon, but unfortunately there wasn’t a breath of wind, so we couldn’t get them airborne and Phyllis declared that her butterfly ‘Would flutter better in more breeze.’

We and our kites are now ready and waiting for a windy day so that we can see them in action!

“At Ross Court Care Home, we believe in living life to the full. That’s why we’re passionate about creating vibrant, stimulating activities that will help our residents to love every day. We call them ‘Magic Moments’.

“Every Brighterkind home now has a Magic Moments Club which provides a vast range of activities and fun things to do that are open to all of our residents.

“The idea behind Magic Moments is that just because someone moves into a care home doesn’t mean that the things they love doing should suddenly stop – quite the contrary.

“We believe our residents should have the opportunity to love every day, by doing the things that they have always loved as well as trying new things along the way.”