Do your students have a hard time writing complete sentences? Do they always ask if they need to write a whole sentence and then groan? I was having this problem over the summer with the now 4th grader that I tutor. She had problems with it during the school year and her teacher mentioned it to me. Not only was she struggling to write complete sentences but she was misspelling words that were in the question. I knew I needed to do something to help her with this sometimes tedious but important skill.
When I taught fourth grade, we used to tell the students
they had to use UTQTATQ. It stood for
Use The Question To Answer The Question.
What? What on earth does that
mean? Well not much if you don’t explain
it to the students and show them what you expect.
I wrote out the phrase for the little girl I tutor and showed her an
example. If the question says “What is
the most important sentence in this paragraph?” then you use the exact words
from the question to start your answer.
“The most important sentence in this paragraph is _______.” Still sort of tricky. So what did we do?? PRACTICE!
I made a bunch of questions to practice. Each page has a different topic like food,
drinks, holidays, summer, winter, etc.
The questions on each page ask an opinion question so there really is no
right or wrong answer. I thought this
was important because I wanted her to focus on learning the format and how to
take words out of the question for the answer.
I didn’t want her to worry what the “right” answer was for each
question. With each response we
practiced going back to double check that every word in her answer was copied correctly
from the question.
We started our summer tutoring with a different question
page for 4 or 5 weeks. Even with this
practice just once a week, I noticed a big difference in her written responses
on the other reading assignments we would work on. First of all, she no longer asked if it
needed to be a complete sentence. She
just did it. Secondly, she was spelling
more words correctly and taking time to go back and check her work.
Now it wasn’t a miracle cure. We still have weeks where she is working on
her homework and starts an answer “It was…” and I say “What was?” And then she looks at me exasperated like
‘lady, did you not just hear the story I read to you?’ So we continue to practice but I think it
helps because I can just tell her UTQTATQ and she knows what I mean and expect from
her.
I put the writing in complete sentences files I created for her in my store. It comes with 20 different pages/topics. Each page includes 5 questions and space for
answers. It also includes an anchor
chart/poster that you can hang up to help remind students of what UTQTATQ is
and what a good and bad example would look like. If you are interested, you can check it out HERE.