Writing advice

[Shay]

My 5th grader was assigned to write a report about a former US president and she recently brought her finished report home. It is very apparent to me that she cut and pasted whole sentences or copied things nearly verbatim from her sources. She used words that I doubt she knows what they mean and the sentence structures, for the most part, were not her own. All of the work was done in class.

 

She wrote, "His championing of human rights was unhappily received....." and, "he had successes in obtaining ratification....". "Building on the work of his predecessors....." These things are not what she would write (and some of the words, I'm certain, she has not idea what they even mean.)

 

On a positive note, each paragraph has a good topic sentence and she has done well on other aspects. She is also a very good writer if given something fun to write about and her teachers have always praised her ability.

 

I'm not trying to be overly critical or harsh BUT, I'd like to teach her to do a better job at expository writing. To be honest, it annoys me that the teacher let this sort of thing pass and I'm sure most of the kids wrote this way.

 

My 4th grader brought home a report on an animal and I noticed the same type of "copying" directly from the sources, but it was not nearly as blatant as my 5th grader's report was. He also is very good with creative writing.

 

I think I can work on this over the summer, as we are going to read some biographies and I can lead the dc through writing some reports. They will resist, but this is such an important thing that it is worth it.

 

Anyone else have a similar experience, and what exactly did you do? I'm also completely open to comments such as "you are making something of nothing", LOL, if you think that is true.

[Sara R]

Here's the plagiarism lecture at our house:

 

"Copying something word for word is plagiarism. You are stealing the author's words, and it's not allowed. You should put the author's ideas into your own words, like you are doing a narration. If the author says something in a special way and it's important to use the author's words, use quotation marks.

 

"If you plagiarize papers in college, you get an F and you can get kicked out of college. [i graded some of these papers, so I know.]"

 

Copying the source word for word isn't uncommon at this age, but it's best to nip this in the bud.

[ack25]

I am right there with you with my 5th grader. In fact, that is why I posted about narrationso and textbooks next year. Perhaps if dd had more narration, summary, and outlining skills, we can overcome the unintentional plagerism problem!

(I say unintentional because she didn't know how wrong it was until dh and I gave her the plagerism lecture!)

[mich311e]

My 6th grade student did that this year. After completely going off on him about plagiarizing...... We worked on outlining. A fifth grader can learn to find the main idea and other significant details in a paragraph. From that have her rewrite it in her own words.

 

 

 

Is there a text or book that covers how to teach outlining? I realize I only have a 1st grader right now but at some point we will cover this.

 

Thanks!

[Shay]

So, it appears that I am in good company with this problem :tongue_smilie:.

 

To be honest, teaching writing skills is something I have never afterschooled and I really want to resist doing anything formal. However, some college profs were lamenting to a friend not too long ago about how college freshman's writing skills, generally, are very poor and suggested that this be the one thing she worked on with her ds.

 

As I mentioned, we are going to read a couple of biographies this summer and perhaps I can model and walk her through the first one or two and then for the last one let her be more on her own.

 

Really though, without being taught these types of writing skills, the students were probably at a loss of how to go about this assignment. But yes, a good talk about plagarism is in order.

[Susie-Knits]

We always worked on note taking by writing key words down then from key words make your own sentences or combining several sections of keywords into more complex sentences. I think that IEW teaches it this way...

 

It is hard to teach that too early but around 5-6 grades worked for us.

Susie

[cjgrubbs]

I think the outlining and rewriting is the perfect solution. This is exactly what Andrew Pudewa teaches in his writing curruiculum, which I LOVE! You can check it out by searching Institute for Excellence in Writing.

[TAKlinda]

When my students copy or plagiarize when writing a paragraph, I warn them about the consequences and then do a search on the internet of the copied sentence. When they see how easy it is to find the webpage they copied from, it becomes a very effective way of prevent further plagiarism.

 

Linda.

[Shay]

Since starting this thread I am thrilled to learn that my son, finishing 4th grade, was taught how to research, outline, cite sources, and write a final report with no plagarizing (yes, they talked about it) in his GT class. He brought home the packet and final report and I was so, so pleased. You could tell the report was in his own words, as it was really quite simple.

 

The wonderful teacher responsible for this has been teaching 30+ years and is responsible for the GT 4th grade class. Perhaps since she is not a regular classroom teacher she has missed all the "readers and writers workshop" approaches and such. She is definitley more traditional and rigorous in her approaches. *That* is how I want my kids prepped for the future. I believe a thank-you email to her is in order :).

[Jeannie in NJ]

Here is something that happened in dd's 9th grade class. The class spent 9 weeks on writing a research paper with all work being done in class, the teacher would check all work and collect all work each day and then hand it back to the students the next day. Well, the day before the finished paper was due, the computors went down at school and were going to be down for a while so the teacher let everyone take their papers home with instructions to bring the finished paper back to school the next day. After looking over the papers , the teacher was ready to explode. SHe said that some of the papers were obviously completely rewritten by the parents. She wrote a email to all parents about how disappointed she was mostly in the parents for doing this.

 

I did not touch one word in dd's paper, it was her paper. The teacher knew that dd had written it as she , the teacher, had checked it each day. She said that it was "the best paper she had ever see, that she thought it was better than most college papers" . Now dd, had read some of her classmates papers and was shocked at how bad they were. So, I don't know how accurate the teachr's praise was, but dd has used IEW since 5th grade so thank you to Mr. Puduwa. His key word outlining instructions are wonderful.

[Windmilldreamer]

I would also seriously consider talking to your daughter's teacher about this. I teach writing at the college level, and I spend a LOT of time reteaching about plagiarism. The time to start teaching students that this is not acceptable is in grade school. Especially now, most kids who are doing this are using a cut and paste mechanism that makes them easy to catch with Google (and there are easier ways to do it that a teacher or school might want to invest in.)

 

I remember hearing a 4th grade class getting a lecture about this during a library class I was sitting in on. The teacher had given all the plagiarized papers a zero.