🤔 Have you started writing your reports?

It's that time!

It’s a three-day weekend here in the States, and every year, I did my darnedest to get a start on those end-of-year reports. Though I was always in dire need of a long, luxurious weekend, I also knew that the sooner I got started the sooner I’d be done. Some of my colleagues came out of Memorial Day weekend with most of their reports done! I always envied them, but I never managed it myself.

But, I actually think it’s nice to get a little bit of distance before you send those reports out. It’s hard to get the perspective you need when you’re still in the thick of it. But you also don’t want them to drag on too long. There’s a balance there somewhere.

A few years ago I put together some thoughts and a strategy for getting your reports done in 30 days—I called it the 30 Days Till Summer Report Writing Challenge. If you start the timer at the end of May, and make sure you’re done by the end of June, you probably won’t feel too burned out on them, and you probably will also get to spend some time in the sun.

That guide gives a day-by-day set of tasks and goes through some of the preliminary work that will help make your report writing a whole lot easier. Here are a few of those things.

• Prepare your workspace.

• Communicate with colleagues.

• Reflect.

• Read some reports from other teachers.

Below, I go through an example of a second-grade report, so you can see how I laid things out. If you’re a paid subscriber, scroll to the bottom to download my report language cheat sheet.

Report Content

My reports varied a bit throughout the grades—increasingly quantitative in the upper grades, more narrative in the lower grades—though I did include a rubric of some sort in every grade. I just found that parents appreciated some graphic elements to understand their students’ progress.

Deciding what information to include is much easier if you’ve been working with a set of benchmarks throughout the year. For example, my second-grade report includes a set of benchmarks for math and one for reading, writing, and grammar. In looking through my second-grade reports as an example, I followed this general outline.

• Overview: Warm letter to parents, main lesson rhythm explanation

• Student narrative: classroom participation and behavior, brief academic, social, and physical reflection

• Rubric: Behavior and Work Habits

• Math Description & Rubric

• Language Arts Description with Rubrics for Oral Communication, Reading, and Writing/Spelling/Grammar

• Conclusion: Warm thoughts about the journey ahead

And just because I can’t help but share, here are the skills that were on the rubrics I used for math and writing/spelling/grammar.

Second Grade Math Skills

• Knows single-digit addition and subtraction facts by heart

• Knows 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11 times tables in order

• Writes and reads numbers up to 1000

• Compares, rounds and estimates numbers up to 1000

• Uses place value to solve double-digit addition and subtraction problems (no regrouping)

• Solves word problems

• Participates in mental math

Second Grade Writing/Spelling/Grammar Skills

• Spells grade appropriate words correctly using phonics rules, including silent e, vowel teams, dipthongs

• Visualizes 5 letters using symbol imagery

• Begins to identify misspelled words when proofreading own compositions

• Demonstrates 2nd grade level vocabulary in writing and speaking

• Takes dictation of simple sentences

• Writes brief summaries of stories they have heard or about something they have done

• Begins to revise own writing with teacher’s support

• Uses printed capital and lower case letters appropriately and neatly

• Identifies nouns and verbs

What did you find helpful to get your reports started? What questions do you have? I’d love to help! Click through and leave your suggestions and questions in the comments.