Elementary Report Card Comments You Can Use Right Now

teaching time management

Effective elementary report card comment ideas that will take the stress out of writing report cards!

Do you ever feel like writing report card comments takes too much time and is more complicated than it needs to be?

I know I totally have! Report card comments feel like an important responsibility on our plates as teachers. We want to get those comments exactly right so we can express student strengths, needs, and how to best support them going forward.

And of course, we want to make sure we adequately express the care we have for our littlest learners successes too!

So how can we, elementary teachers, write effective report card comments in less time? That's what we're chatting about here. In this blog post, we'll cover:

Report card comment ideas for all students, and
A simple formula for putting a well-thought out comment together

POSITIVE REPORT CARD COMMENTS

One rule to live by when writing report card comments is that they should always start out positive.

Starting with a positive statement, particularly about the student's character, helps set a good tone for the comment in its entirety.

Teacher Tip: It can be really helpful to make a list of positive terms you can use to describe student personality and behavior at the start of your comments!

You can also find a full list of helpful report card comment terms in this Report Card Comment Templates and Guide resource from my TpT store.

Here are some positive report card comment ideas (replace student with the child's name):

Student is kind-hearted and respectful.
Student is inclusive of all peers.
Student works and plays cooperatively in groups.
Student is polite and spirited.
Student always puts forth a sincere effort in class.

ACADEMIC CAPABILITIES REPORT CARD COMMENTS

When writing report card comments, regardless of student achievement levels, it's most important to be:

straightforward
objective
factual

Use a sentence starter that allows you to clearly state what a student is able to do in the academic areas.

For example: "Student can ___." or "Student is independently ____."

Here are some more specific examples of report card comments that tell what a student can do:

Student independently uses phonetic spelling in their writing.
Student is meeting reading standards at this time.
In math, student can count to 100 by ones and tens.
Student can segment and blend words independently.
Student can identify rhyming pairs with teacher support.

REPORT CARD COMMENTS TO ADDRESS STUDENT NEEDS

One of the challenges of writing report cards is effectively expressing areas of student needs.

Just like when we express what students are doing academically, it's important to express areas of need in straightforward, neutral, and specific comments.

Having a bank of terms you use when a student is still progressing toward meeting a standard is a helpful tool to have handy when writing comments!

Here are some examples of report card comments that tell about student needs:

Student is practicing identifying vowel letter sounds in order to meet the sound identification standard.
Student is including the beginning sounds of words in their writing. We are working with student on segmenting sounds to help them make progress toward meeting the phonetic spelling standard.

REPORT CARD COMMENTS IN A SNAP!

Are you ready to stop stressing about report card comments and start feeling confident about writing them?

You can learn more about time-saving tips for report cards in this FREE mini-PD:

OR if you're ready to have templates, ideas, and tools that will help you get those report cards done, like, yesterday ... check out this Report Card Comment Templates and Guide resource.