School Report Card Comments
The time of year is once again approaching when you have to sit around your desk and write school report card comments for your class. If you usually have to struggle with this task, continue reading this article as it will provide you with some very important steps that you should take in order to write report card comments that will be significant to your students as well as their parents.
Writing report card comments is a skill, as these comments are brief summaries of your students’ performance throughout the year. Report card comments are your way of communicating with the parents of your students. When you sit down to write these comments, you need to be able to pinpoint each student’s strengths and weaknesses, and effectively express them in each comment.
Start With An Adjective Brainstorm – The first thing you need to do is to make a list of all the students in your class. Beside the name of each student you should write down an adjective that best defines each student as a learner; try not to repeat the adjectives that you’ve already used. You can start this process at least two weeks before you actually start writing these report card comments, so that you have enough time to find descriptive words for your students.
Make Supporting Notes – Once you’re through writing the list of adjectives, during class time jot down notes that validate your observations. You can practically use any situation to jot down notes on your students’ performance. This could be a piece of artwork, an essay, behavior on the playground or participation in class. It would be great if you could provide parents with school report comments of actual experiences, rather than just making general comments.
Make Use of Sentence Stems – By using sentence stems you will get the ideas flowing, especially when you have to write comments about those students who are hard to describe. You can try using the following sentence stems for your school report comments:
- Timothy’s best work this past term was…
- Cecilia has shown improvement in…
- This year I was happy to see that Drake…
- Ask Patrice to speak to you about…
- This quarter Christine challenged herself by…
Pinpoint the Positives – You should make an effort to focus on the strengths of your students, so that they and their parents can build on them. The areas that need improvement can be showcased through grades, report-card notations or conduct codes. If there are negative areas, you can rework these into positives. For instance, you may have students who are distracted easily and restless, in your report card comments about these students you can say that they are energetic. Despite how a student might misbehave, school card comments were not designed to take disciplinary actions.
Avoid Using Sarcasm or Criticism – Think about the effect that what you write will have on your students and their parents. If you use the term “class clown” to describe a student who is acting out in class, you could make an already bad situation worse. You could instead write that the child needs to focus more in class.
First Write the Report Card Comments that are Easiest to write – When you start with the students who are easiest to describe, then this will enable you to not only go faster, but be able to spend more time on the school card comments that are harder to write. You might even realize that you have more to say about the hard to describe students than you previously thought.
Ask Fellow Teachers For Help – After you have made a list of your adjectives, you might want to ask your colleagues for some help. Ask the various teachers what they think about the performance of your students, and use these as aids to help you write your final report card comments.
