Help Yourself with these free Report Card Resources
Well, it’s that time of year again. Report Cards are here and all educators are panicking. I always struggle with report cards and I wanted to share some resources that may make your life a little easier.
Report Card Writing Checklist:
Learning Skills by Students:
We all want our students to be reflective and be able to self-reflect on their learning and how they learn. The best way to do this is by giving them an assignment where they write their own Learning Skills. Assign this work to your students in Google Classroom. Get them to edit their Name, their pronouns, and the proper word for their amount of responsibility, organization, collaboration, and so on. By the students ‘grading’ themselves, you will be able to place the proper grade into their learning skills. Before doing so, you need to re-through their learning skills and make sure the paragraph and chosen words match the student and the student’s behavior. If you read it through and it doesn’t sound like the student, meet with them to work through the paragraph together.
Let Students see Report Cards before they are final:
Every year, I hand out report cards to my students before they go home. I give them quiet time to read through the reports and circle and underline questions they have. When the rest class is working we meet and discussed their thoughts and mine.
I have to say that being really organized using Google Drive helped me pull up all their grades, self-assessed or teacher assessed, and then we could really discuss it.
Some students made quite persuading arguments and their marks were changed. Some students forgot that they self-assessed themselves with a certain mark and that influenced their grades. Some students disagreed with their learning skills mark that they had written themselves and I had to remind them that they decided on that qualifier and grade themselves.
The process of sharing the report card before it actually goes home has been essential in my classroom. It helps the students learn, consistently self-assess, demonstrate mutual respect and trust, and reduces stress since they know exactly what will be going home to their parents or guardians.
Here are some thoughts from my students:
I think that it’s good that Mrs Bowker does that because before we go home with our report cards we know our grades, we have more confidence and are not stressed out. -K.A.
We don’t have to worry about how our parents are going to react to our marks because we know what grade we got and we agree with the marks. -L.A
I like how Mrs Bowker lets us see our report cards before they go home so we can check our marks and tell her if we disagree with them and we talk about the marks so we aren’t upset. -L.J.
I like that Mrs Bowker gives us our report cards so we know what level we are at and how we can improve. -H.A.
Which resource are you excited to try? Let me know if the comments!
