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Community service isn’t just about helping others; it’s a chance for middle schoolers to build leadership skills and discover their passions. Whether helping other kids at school, supporting local charities, or cleaning up trash, community service helps build empathy, responsibility, and teamwork. Go beyond the classic can drives or tree plantings and encourage your class to try these unique community service ideas for middle school students.
Create impactful individual community service projects
Helping others can be a blast. Plus, it’s an excellent way for kids to connect, create, and give back. From cheering up local hospitals to brightening the day at a senior center, there are many fun ways for students to get involved.
Community service ideas for middle school students are also easy to tie into gratitude activities or kindness challenges. Whether it’s art, science, or just good old-fashioned creativity, there’s a perfect project out there for every student to help their community. Plus, April is National Volunteer Month, so it’s an ideal time to roll up your sleeves and get to work.
Students looking to complete a community service project on their own can try out these individual ideas:
- Host a virtual book club: Many students in hospitals have difficulty connecting with other kids their age while getting treatment. Setting up a virtual book club between two or more students gives them something to connect over and look forward to.
- Research lost history: Does your town have a history only a few know about? Create a history book of your town and its well-known stories to share at your local library.
- Build a positive mental health wall: It all starts with a sticky note! Write positive messages on sticky notes and put them on bulletin boards and walls. Encourage others to help create a positive message wall.
- Construct a language swap board: Invite people around your community to share the languages they speak by creating a language swap wall at the local library or community center. You write a message and encourage others to write it in other languages, so you can learn from one another and celebrate the many cultures in your area.
- Craft personalized bookmarks for libraries: Use scrap construction paper and markers to make original bookmarks for local libraries. Adding book characters can make them more fun.
- Bake goodies for local facilities: Budding bakers can make cookies, treats, bread, and more to donate to local shelters and assisted living facilities. It’s an excellent way to try out new recipes.
Career Exploration, VOLUNTEERING, VOLUNTEERISM, Career Lessons, Vocational
By Career and Life Skills Lesson
Grades: 7th-12th
Use this learning module to help students understand how volunteering can impact their community and increase job opportunities. This resource includes a PowerPoint, worksheets, student skeleton notes, a quiz, and a game.
Volunteer Documentation Sheet: Student Volunteer Service Log
By TG Inspired ELA
Grades: PreK-12th
Allow your students to log their volunteer hours with an easy-to-use tracking sheet. Just note that the sheet is not editable.
Band together to make a big impact in middle school
Sometimes, making an impact takes a group effort. Whole-class community service ideas for middle school students can have a bigger impact on them! If your class doesn’t have community service requirements to meet, you can link the service projects to your Common Core Standards. For example, writing letters to assisted living residents could relate to the Common Core 6-8 Writing Standards. Give them some writing prompts for middle school to try and get the wheels turning.
Try out some of these ideas to get them thinking about ways to improve the lives of others:
- Set up a pop-up tutoring clinic: Students will create a schedule and advertise a pop-up tutoring clinic for help with any subject. It could be online or in-person with a teacher chaperone.
- Devise a puzzle and game exchange: Get parents and students to donate board games, puzzles, etc. Create an exchange program at your local library. You could even do this for video games and movies.
- Give warm socks: Socks are a much-needed item for people experiencing homelessness. Get donations of socks and other essentials, and use them to wrap items like gifts. Give them to local agencies helping this population to hand out with handwritten encouraging notes.
- Plan a pop-up clothing store: Have kids brainstorm ways to get used and new clothing items. They could host a pop-up clothing store where community members can shop for free clothing and necessities.
- Start a shelter pet storytime: With permission, take a field trip to a local animal shelter and pair each student up with an animal they can read stories to. If doing it in person isn’t feasible, consider having students make videos or audio recordings for the animals to listen to.
Service Learning Project – Research and Planning Organizers
By TheGiftedPerspective
Grades: 6th-8th
This resource provides step-by-step instructions for creating a service learning project. It comes with complete topics, research instructions, a graphic organizer, and a project planner.
Color your community with kindness
Community service ideas for middle school students aren’t one-size-fits-all. They’re filled with color, creativity, and fun. Some projects are so imaginative that they could double as your next junior high art projects. So grab your sidewalk chalk, dust off your pastels, and get ready to dive into some inspiring ideas.
These projects aren’t just good for the community; they’re perfect for all your future artists and designers:
- Create sock monsters: Students who love to sew might be into creating stuffed toys to donate to local children in need. All you need are stocks, stuffing, a marker, and buttons. These sock monsters can be donated to a local agency to hand out to children.
- Paint the town in kindness: Have students paint rocks with kind words that can be placed around the community to brighten someone’s day. These are great for scavenger hunts, too.
- Create a kindness path: Choose a trail in your area that many walk. Have students decorate it with sidewalk chalk with positive messages, images, and inspirational quotes.
- Color cards for heroes: Local teachers, firefighters, postal workers, etc., love to receive a nice word or card. Have students create cards with personalized messages for the unsung heroes in your community.
- Conceptualize a kindness mural: Talk with a local retailer in your area and discuss creating a kindness mural. You might also create kindness murals in parking lots with concrete paint.
- Create educational chalk art: Decorate a prominent trail or path in the community with facts, math equations, and other educational material. It creates the perfect walk and learn activity.
- Have a Bob Ross auction: Bob Ross is known for his happy little trees. Have students paint inspirational, kindness, and happiness paintings in Bob Ross’ style to auction off for money for local charities.
- Craft art for local dog shelters: This project can be done in many different ways. Have students create artwork for the local shelter to hang up or auction off for donations.
- Decorate kindness & positivity bracelets: Acquire some yarn and beads with letters to create inspiring and positive messages that you can leave at hospitals or similar locations.
Invent STEM community service ideas for middle school students
Ever thought about mixing community service with your STEM lessons? STEM and community service go together like robots and rocket fuel. There are many creative ways to fold real-world kindness into your science, tech, engineering, and math adventures.
- Draft simple water filters: Have students work together to brainstorm ways to create DIY water filters to give everyone in the community clean water. They can create them to give out and draft posters so people can make their own.
- Make a pollinator garden: Plant a flower garden somewhere near the school that the community can enjoy. Have students investigate the pollinators the garden attracts.
- Become a trash tracker: Select an area to clean up and have students collect data about the trash. They should then create a table based on the trash cleanup to use as an infographic, so others in the community can spread the importance of not littering.
- Record how-to videos for seniors: Seniors struggle with many tech questions that middle schoolers find second nature. Have them create a collection of how-to videos to share with the local seniors in the community.
- Fix broken toys to donate: Have people around the community donate broken toys that your STEM students work to fix and make new again. The students get to play with electronics, and local kids get toys. It’s a win-win!
- Craft a free food pantry: Have students work together to draft a type of bin where people could donate food and others could take from. They must ensure it is safe from the elements and keep the food shelf stable. They could then create and put the box around the community with a poster explaining how to use it.
STEM Problem Solving Service Learning Project
By Go Beyond
Grades: 4th-12th
Standards: CCSSRI.4.1, 4.2, 4.3d
Use this resource to present your students with a community service problem and brainstorm ways to solve it. You’ll have access to teachers, timeline activities, student handouts, grading rubrics, and activity logs. It also includes banners and invitations for a solution event.
Get in the community service mindset with TPT project ideas
From simple projects they can do on their own to school-wide projects your class will be excited about, there is a little bit of everything on middle school community service projects. Learning is more fun when students get the opportunity to immerse themselves in it and make a difference.