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Citing Resources and Avoiding Plagiarism


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As soon as they're writing essays/reports with sources. We  touched on it this year for sixth grade while using MCT's Essay Voyage. We move on to his Advanced Academic Writing next year (7th grade), and if I remember correctly most of the writing assignments will include a Works Cited page. He follows the MLA format.

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I've heard of citing sources being taught as early as first grade now in some schools. I think that's rather ridiculous. I think most places are still doing it later, more like fourth or fifth. We'll be doing it around 6th or 7th here. I think elementary school is still on the early end. I mean, could they do it? Sure, but what's the point before they can do more with it?

 

My kids know what plagiarism is, but in elementary school I have wanted the focus to be on learning to get the words out, so I have specifically told them that in this stage of writing, it's okay to borrow the words and phrases for narrations, especially if they remember them. We focus on retelling, not on rephrasing and summary most of the time (though this is changing - we've been working on summary this year in fifth). They never sit there and copy the page, so I don't really have any worries about this, but I know that if they were worried about rephrasing every single thing for every written narration, we'd never get off the ground. We're moving away from that now in fifth grade. Probably within the next couple of years, I'll talk more about the need to be sure you're not plagiarizing when you write and what that looks like - not just not copying the words from a text but also citing the ideas and not copying the structure or outline. 

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Last year, I had my then fifth grader write a 2-page research with citations using MLA.  He didn't quite get it.  But, as we speak, he is editing his three-page paper, and I am ruthless with the citations.  His writing book gives examples, so there is no excuse for not citing properly or writing a works cited page.  My fourth grader is a bit behind in writing, but I still required him to cite sources on his power point presentations :)

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And if for some reason you can't get to it in middle school, high school is fine, too, for first exposure. I teach a Lit. & Comp. co-op class for grades 7-12 students, and most of the students -- high schoolers, too -- have not done citations before. They all pick it up pretty quickly.

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