Fun at the carnival

Step right up and try to win a prize.

During the Golden Hour Senior Center's summer carnival, seniors were encouraged to play as many games as they could to try and win prizes.

"What we're trying to do is get them up and moving," executive director Sheela Schermetzler said.

She and the other employees felt the summer carnival they were hosting did what they intended it to.

"They love this," Schermetzler said.

A lot of the senior center visitors have arthritis or rheumatism, which causes them a lot of pain.

"They are in pain and don't want to move," she said.

The problem is they need to move. Keeping muscles and joints active actually decreases pain for seniors with these problems.

"We get them up out of their seats," Schermetzler said. "This is important to them."

It didn't seem the like employees had to work to hard getting the seniors involved for this particular event. With games such as bean bag toss, marshmallow toss, ring toss, pop the balloon and fishing, the residents were in line to play the games again and again.

They also played spin the wheel, bounce the ball into a crate, a disk drop game and they had the chance to guess how many items were in jars. Of course, the residents received prizes for the games they won.

Some seniors thought they could only play the games once, but activities and marketing coordinator, Barbara Bates continued to make announcements over a microphone encouraging seniors to come back up and play again.

Others stood at one of the stations and continued to play until someone else wanted a turn. This happened quite a bit at one of the most challenging games -- the ring toss.

The center's carnival even had a photo booth and fake tattoo table.

After all of the carnival games were done, the seniors were treated to a carnival-themed lunch, including corn dogs, corn on the cob, navajo tacos, pizza, caramel apple salad and zucchini sticks.

Each resident was also given a bag of kettle corn to take home.