Mrs. Osborne (a retired Stoughton teacher) came and taught us a cheer that would help us when we were writing great answers to open response questions.  It is quite catchy and has really helped the fourth graders understand the best way to organize their thinking in a way that makes sense.  Check out the cheer and what some of it stands for!

So here are more details about each part.

According to...  This is how we start the response to show that we are referring to the text.

G Genre

T Title

A Author

TTQA... Turn The Question Around - this reminds the kids to use words from the question to frame their answer.

Answer! What is their answer statement for the question being asked?

         

All of this really goes into the first sentence of their response. For example, a topic sentence we worked on today went something like:

According to the nonfiction article, Menu Changes, by Brenda Iasevoli, schools are trying to persuade kids to eat more frutis and vegetables in many ways.

The cheer goes on to remind students to include 3 examples to support their answer and to include details from the text with their examples.  

The last part of the cheer is I.  This is to remind the kids to go a step further and apply something they read to their own lives.  For example, they might write:

If I was in charge of student lunches, I would have a bunch of fruit available each day so kids could always choose their favorite.

We have been using this cheer for several months now and the kids have shown that they can apply it to just about any question and write a well organized response that shows evidence from the text.