Creating good senior trivia questions can be a little harder than it would first seem. Usually it is a matter of simply asking yourself what a good question would be for an interesting answer. Although it doesn't sound like a difficult thing to do, once you test your questions on someone else you can better gauge how easy or how difficult they really are.
When looking for good senior trivia questions of your own, to stay in keeping with a particular senior facility or a seniors own life, the people they know and the events that have taken place in their life, you need to simply begin by writing down many answers. Be careful that your answers are not too difficult for most people to be able to answer. It can take the fun out of a game quickly if most people just become spectators of who else will guess the answer first!
Once you have a list of answers, formulate the question. Slowly add more detail to complicate it. If you add details immediately you might make it too difficult right away, and because you know the answer, you may not think to revisit it for revision. Take these steps going carefully through all your answers, and then test them out on several people.
If you have a seniors facility with seniors of varying memory capabilities and they will all be participating, it is important to keep in mind that some questions be very easy, even obvious, for these select patients. If playing trivia with seniors that have memory difficulties, you may like to try visual cues in addition to asking the questions. For example when asking the questions, "How many legs does a chair have?" or "Who was the main actor in the TV show 'Gunsmoke'?" you could hold up pictures of a chair, or the actor James Arness, respectively. (Nurses or caregivers can offer slight help to individuals, but be careful not to make it obvious to the others!).
Prizes can be fun to use with trivia games. Don't save them all for the end of the game; for the person who got the most right answers, for instance. Offer some prizes for whoever can guess some of the more complicated questions, who can guess the fastest, or who can guess 'how many of' questions. The air can get electric with some on the edge of their seats and many with the answers on the tip of their tongues!
Trivia is particularly useful in a care facility or senior center when focused around a holiday, or a month long theme such as Christmas or Luau. There is trivia available for purchase for almost every occasion, country, ethnic origin, or entertainment media you can think of. If finding or purchasing the trivia you need is too difficult, then you can simply design your own questions as I've outlined above. Of course, it can be very helpful to get many other people contributing their ideas for the trivia questions too.
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