Students from Rock Island, Illinois, started Closet2Closet to help local homeless and foster kids build their wardrobes. Kids struggling with a difficult home situation may have trouble with basics, such as school clothes that help them feel comfortable and confident. Donate your fashionable threads to a good cause. Students will grasp that basic human needs are not always easily attainable by all members of society and look at the issue from a different point of view. Social-emotional focus: Perspective-taking. Bus or carpool in groups to the centers, so the students can be the ones delivering these essential goods. Fill the socks, mittens, and hats with toiletries, snacks, water bottles, or other requested items. Once you’ve collected donations, have a Stuffing Saturday with your volunteer middle schoolers. Consider having shelter personnel visit the class and speak to students’ efforts that might impact lives. Collect cold-weather essentials.Ī sock, mitten, and hat drive is a great way to bring warmth and kindness to shelters or donation centers. Providing them with an opportunity to help, is a powerful lesson. Food drive volunteer projects help teens better understand the needs of the millions of people who do. Lots of kids have no idea what it’s like to have a hungry belly. Social-emotional focus: Ethical responsibility. Give students ownership of the project from start to finish. Tasks include getting the word out, setting up receptacles for receiving donations, sorting donations, and transporting donations to a local food bank or families in need. Work with your students to organize a food drive by dividing them into teams to tackle the logistics of the project. Helping food insecure families is an important task, especially around the holidays. An estimated 17 million Americans could become food insecure because of the pandemic, “bringing the total to more than 54 million people in the country, including 18 million children.” Looking at those sobering numbers, there is a high likelihood that there are food insecure families in your local community, and probably even in your own school. Organize a food drive.įood insecurity across the country rose significantly this past year. Working to combat this issue will also help your students learn how to better relate to others with sensitivity, understanding, and acceptance. Together, students can come up with creative solutions for cyberbullying and discuss tactics to create a safe and welcoming online community. You can work with your own students to set up a safe space to talk with their peers. The organization even made a comic book to share cyberbullying advice. The Allstate Foundation empowered Abbey Sanger to establish the Diverse Gaming Coalition, a nonprofit organization and a safe space for teens to talk about their cyberbullying experiences. Middle schoolers are no strangers to cyberbullying issues, but what they may not realize is that they aren’t alone, and many kids their age have also been targeted. That’s why we have compiled our top volunteer opportunities for kids to help get you started. So how can teachers make student volunteer opportunities truly meaningful? What’s going to ignite that spirit of giving in your students and make it stick? Ownership! A student-run service project helps strengthen teens’ social-emotional core. As an added bonus, volunteer projects help teens learn important social-emotional skills such as compassion, social awareness, relationship skills, leadership, and more. Giving back instills in children the idea that they can make the world a better place, one small project at a time. Teaching students to give back to their communities is essential.
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