The elementary report card uses descriptive terms of "Beginning", "Developing" and "Secure" rather than simple percentages or letter grades. These terms reflect a learning continuum:

Beginning (B): Student seldom demonstrates an understanding of concepts and procedures, while requiring consistent support.

Developing (D): Student accomplishes part of the task independently. Student can sometimes explain or demonstrate the process but may need prompting to complete it.

Secure (S): Student performance meets the demands of the task and demonstrates a firm grasp of the concepts and procedures involved. Student can independently apply understanding in different contexts.

At various times throughout the year, your child may begin new concepts and may be at that Beginning level of skill, or s/he may quickly become Secure in a skill area. Once students have achieved Secure in a skill or concept, teachers can expand learning opportunities to dig deeper into a concept or topic, apply the concept in a new setting, or move more quickly to the next units/lessons.

These descriptive terms also provide the opportunity to assess a child's mastery from a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including tests, assignments, classroom work, participation, without attempting to assign a number or percentage to qualitative observations.

Teachers use assessments to determine a student’s level of mastery for each skill or concept. Each assessment will have questions or tasks with different levels of difficulty.  The simple questions, or rubric level 2 (R-2) questions, address basic concepts and ideas within a subject area.  The complex questions, or rubric level 3 (R-3) questions, address complex concepts and ideas within a subject area.  The above and beyond questions, or rubric level 4 (R-4) questions, provide an opportunity for students to combine knowledge in new ways.  Following is a sample of a scored assessment.   

Grade 2 – Sample Unit

Essential Learning: Number Sense and Computation

Communicating with parents about student learning is an important priority for teachers in Minnetonka Schools.  At the elementary level, teachers send weekly emails about classroom activities, meet with parents for parent-teacher conferences twice a year and regularly send home student work. Most importantly, informal communication among the teacher and family, via phone, email, notes, or face to face discussions allows parents and teachers to work as partners in helping children achieve their highest potential.

The teacher gradebook is another communication tool, open to parents throughout the school year through Skyward Family Access. The gradebook has end of unit assessments (also known as summative assessments) for reading, math and science.  In future years, health, social studies and other learning areas will also be added. Skyward Family Access also holds all standardized test scores a student has on file while enrolled in Minnetonka Schools.

Parent-Teacher conferences are held in October and March each year and provide an opportunity to learn more about student progress, including discussing work samples, work habits and qualitative achievement data that is not easily stored in our student information system.

Report cards are issued twice a year, at the end of first semester and second semester (January and June).  Report cards provide a historical snapshot of student performance over half a year. Report cards are available in Skyward Family Access one week after the semester ends. Report cards should be viewed as one form of communication from the school about a child's progress. However, with all of the other communication parents receive from teachers during the year, the Elementary Report Card should contain no "new" information for parents; it is a summary document of learning.