The school year is finally over here in Scotland (today was the last day) and school “learner reports” were sent home from our kid’s primary school. After a couple of years of COVID and of being effectively locked out of my children’s school, I’m excited to get any glimpse into their school life that I can.

These school reports are multi-page and dense with descriptions of what and how they did in various areas of their academics. Since they are just five and nine years old respectively, I wasn’t expecting a ton of info in these, but it feels like a lot!

After closer inspection, a lot of the text is pretty boilerplate and obviously written carefully not to offend. It’s hard to glean much insight but here are a few highlights taken verbatim from the report that I was happy to see and/or made me tilt my head in curiosity.

[Vivian] has very mature listening skills and is always respectful of other people’s opinions.

Vivian is very interested in science and how things work in the world. She has a very curious mind and enjoys doing experiments. She should be encouraged to learn in this area.

[Vivian] has been learning to make posters through PowerPoint […] and has also completed some word processing.

In art and design [Vivian] has developed her drawing to scale skills and shading skills. She is talented in this area of the curriculum.

[Vivian] always demonstrates kindness and lovely manners to both staff and her peers. Vivian is especially interested in protecting animals and the Earth. She has good knowledge about how we can protect animals.

Sam participates well in our lessons and comes up with some fantastic ideas for his writing. Recently [Sam] has been working very hard to write more independently.

Sam is far more confident within [Numeracy and Mathmatics] as he can count beyond 20 as well as identify written numbers with ease. Sam has been learning to count to 100 as well as count in 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s.

In particular, [Sam] has enjoyed learning about our money topic through role play activities in our classroom shop and can now identify most coins. Sam can also successfully identify o’clock times on an analogue clock and has enjoyed exploring fractions and sharing.

Sam loves to take part during P.E. and has explored fitness stations, played parachute games, and learned some of the skills uuses to play hockey and basketball. He particularly enjoys taking part in team games as he loves to compete with his peers and move at speed.

Sam is a kind and well-mannered pupil who loves socializing with his friends. He has made some fantastic achievements this year as he celebrated becoming a Star Writer on more than one occasion as well as being our Star of the Week.

So the summary is that Vivian loves reading and writing, Sam like numbers and physical activities. The results weren’t all that surprising in the end. Nobody knows how the next years will go but I’m proud of how things turned out this year. It was cool to get these reports, they beat my expectations.

Only six weeks of summer until school starts anew and we do it all again!