My mom has had a stroke which affected her ability to speak, read and write; thankfully, all of those are coming back with speech therapy. She has has developed severe arthritis in the hand she writes with and her short term memory is very poor. She likes to make lists of the things she wants to discuss with us, things that she needs and the like. She's in a NH and we are trying to figure out the best way to give her back her list-making ability, preferably low tech--any great ideas out there?
If the list is for chores or places to go or gift ideas or things to do, someone could make different card stacks for her for each category.
Not sure how practical this is but in a classroom, it was a great hands-on way for young children to learn.
My thought to you is that, with arthritis, hopefully your mom will learn to be short and to the point with her lists and that would help.
Right now, I'm not very far along with this with my own mom, but here are my own efforts, for what they're worth:
1. Mom keeps a calendar of all appointments and events. My thought to you is that you can get stickers. Your mom might be able to place stickers for some of the bits rather than writing, although placement might be tricky if her arthritis is bad.
2. My mom has a notebook that is a mess. I was thinking of several notebooks for several purposes. But I then realized I think I want to get her a notebook that has sections to it, so that each section can be for different things. I don't know if they come in anything but 8.5x11", though, and she likes her notebooks smaller than that so she can shove them in her purse. But that's my next thing. Maybe one section for things she wants to call relatives to talk about, another section for things she needs to buy, etc... And she's not good at crossing things off, so that's another thing to do.
3. I was planning to get her a whiteboard so she can easily track daily things. As she takes her medications for the day, she can put a mark on it, that kind of thing. If she eats, she can mark it on the board (she forgets to eat -- it freaks out both her and me, but that's how bad her memory has gotten, so this isn't as strange a plan as you might think).
To you, I would suggest considering a cheap recording device. Check them out someplace like Best Buy or Amazon and see if you can get one cheaply. I don't know the prices. Actually, I'm so cheap that I keep my old K-Mart tape recorder with a cassette tape, just for this kind of occasion.