Is your school or district using standards based report cards and grading systems? Or are they thinking of moving to a standards based system? Perhaps you’re just looking for a better way to report student progress with a common core aligned or other standards aligned report card. These report cards can definitely help you with that.
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Several years back, the small school district at which I taught was going through some changes. We had changed our grading system, and still didn’t have a report card that could be used across all grades K-8.
We had switched to standards based grading and I found it to be eye-opening, to say the least. It became easier to grade and easier to see exactly which areas I needed to reteach. I was surprised at how well my students responded to this as well.
If you do standards based reporting, you may have discovered, like I did, that it’s revealing in a very positive way. When you grade with a standards based rubric, and share those grades with parents, you can give solid evidence of their children’s progress, areas of strength, and areas needing improvement.
One time I had a disgruntled parent complain to the principal about a grade her child received. Have you ever had that experience? ? This system came in very handy. I shared my rubrics and grading scales with them for the assignments in question, and all was resolved, quickly and simply. There’s no arguing with data.
If you read this blog on a regular basis, you know that it’s all about keeping you organized and making things as simple as possible. You also know that teachers love solid data. I take reporting on student progress very seriously, and I want to give the most accurate picture possible.
So during this time of change, when we didn’t have a system yet, I was a bit…discombobulated. We needed a way to track our grades that would directly correlate with a report card. I began with creating standards based rubrics for everything.
I sat down with my gradebook, which I divided into sheets for each of the Common Core Anchor Standards. At that time, I was using a program for recording grades called Gradekeeper. I highly recommend it. It’s made by a teacher, for teachers, and I was able to create the sheets for each standard.
This is an image of the report card in Sheets with the Common Core Standards.
These standards based report cards grew from the roots of my digital grade books. I began by creating a Standards Based Report Card Template so that teachers and teaching teams could adapt it to fit whatever standards they want or need.
These report cards are designed to be easy and fast to use. You don’t want something time consuming where you have to type in grades on 32 separate sheets and then print them one by one. That’s way too much work.
As a solution to that problem, this report card template has one data entry sheet. On that sheet, you input your students’ names. Their names will populate into their own individual report cards.
Next, on the same data entry sheet, you enter their grades for each standard by term. Again, the grades populate into their own report cards. It’s as fast as entering grades into a gradebook.
After that, you can visit each student’s report card, and update or change a grade if you’d like. You can type in the comments for that reporting period. Finally, there’s room to add special classes or activities the students are involved in.
This is an image of the report card in Excel.
The print settings are made for landscape 8.5 x 11 paper. You can see an example of the front and back in the images below.
In order to use these, you’ll need to have Excel or Google Sheets (™) on your computer. In this preview video, you can get a visual of how these features work, such as setting up your school data, adding students, and entering grades.
Within the report card file you have even more videos showing you how to make specific edits and adaptations that you might want to do.
If you prefer to have the report card already set up with your grade level Common Core standards, and not just have a template, I’ve created report cards for all the grades from Kindergarten to 8th grade in Excel. However, you can still make changes to the report cards that are already set up. The same areas that are editable in the template are editable in the grade level report cards.
Understandably, some people are a bit intimidated by Excel. For that reason, I also created the template in Google Sheets (™). I’m in the process of creating each grade level in the Google Sheets (™) version as well.
There are quarters based report cards, trimester based report cards, and coming soon, semester based report cards.
No matter your level of technology, the videos walk you through the set up and use of these report cards.
I’m super happy to share with you that you can use the TeacherWriter Report Card Comment Generator. It makes writing comments so fast and painless, you’ll save countless hours over writing them from scratch.
Want to know more?
I’m always happy to hear from teachers using these report cards. It makes my day! Here are a few of the reviews for these report cards.
* I’m looking forward to working more with this resource. I love that it is incredibly mobile and I can take the work anywhere with my school chromebook. I think this will definitely be a time saver and am very pleased with this purchase! ~~~Leslie R.
*This was EXTREMELY useful in finding the key standards to report to parents. GREAT job on this. Money well spent!! I so appreciate the format and verbiage. ~~~Sarah H.
*My school made the switch to standards based grading and this was a great tool that helped us shape our own report card! ~~~Kayla B.
*My son is homeschooled, but will be attending a private high school. He applied for a scholarship from a community organization and they would not consider him unless he submitted a formal report card. This report card is very thorough and hits all necessary skills. ~~~Amy S.
*This was just what I was looking for with my small POD class of three children. Concise, clear targets for kids, and easy to complete. Thank you. ~~~Linda B.
*This saved me SO much time! Thank you! ~~~Elizabeth O.
Are you on Pinterest? Save this pin so you can find the report cards anytime!
The standards based report card templates are available in several places online. You can find the full suite of report cards, with individual grade levels, on Teachers Pay Teachers.
There are two versions: one for a quarter system and one for a trimester system. The semester version is coming soon, as I’m making more updates to these report cards. Make sure you check for the version that’s appropriate for your school.
I hope you’ll check them out and find out how much time using these report cards can save you. Here’s where to find them.
Hey, thanks for reading this far! You’re amazing!
These standards based gradebooks are created in Google Sheets (™) . They’re super handy and easy to use. I blogged about them here. They also have sheets for each Anchor Standard, but you can edit them to match any standards your school uses. They have drop down lists for all the standards that fall under that domain. You can even create a quick progress report with them.
LOVE this! I have bought so many gradebooks trying to find the one I like and will work for my purposes! This by far has come the closest to what I need and it is so easy to make changes and add things as I need to. Great work! ~~~Teshia, 3rd Grade
This resource was extremely easy to customize and use. It was my first year for Standardized Grades and I was struggling with tracking everything. This was helpful to have and when I did have questions, the creator got back to me quickly. ~~~Joelle, 3rd Grade
This is a pretty heavy duty gradebook. It took me a minute to figure out how to navigate, but the information is thorough, the layout makes sense (once you explore a bit), and the seller left a tremendous amount of tips and tricks throughout. I look forward to using this to help organize my standards based grading this year. Mahalo! ~~~Emily, 5th Grade
