Research and writing is hard work. It’s difficult to sift through information to find interesting facts, and it’s even more difficult to turn that information into your own words. Kids have trouble with it all the time. What’s worse is that kids rarely cite the source of their information, and that’s where we run into plagiarism and copyright infringement.
This week, while the kids are watching the movie version of “the Diary of Anne Frank,” I’m working to compile a booklet of information they can use to learn more about the Holocaust, learn how to incorporate information into parphases and summaries, how to quote another source and integrate that quote into the text of a paper, and how to cite all this information.
When the week is over, I should be able to present to the students a handbook they can write in and take through to the next level — high school.
But I’m going about it a little backward, and you’ll get the parts I work on as they’re completed.
(click the images to download the word documents)
Today I finished the MLA Citation Made Easy section of the booklet.
Part one focuses on how to find a quote in a book and how to utilize that quotation when your own words are not strong enough to cover the material.
Part two focuses on how to work that information into a Works Cited page — where your reader can figure out exactly which book you used to find that quote. It also discusses the information you’ll need to enter on your works cited page(s): author, title, etc., etc.
the third page look almost the same as the first, but it shows a website and the quote pulled from it. Like the first page, it shows how to work the quotation into your own writing, and shows how to inset the parenthetical notation into the text.
The fourth page is almost exactly the same as the second in that it shows how to cull information for a works cited page. But internet citations are a little tricky — and the “things you’ll need” section contains images to show off exactly what information is required to pull of a real citation.
All of this is preliminary, and keep in mind that these pages will eventually fit into the middle of a larger booklet. Tomorrow, I’ll share the other pages I plan to use which will include worksheets that ask students to write about the characters in the play and the charcters in the movie. There will also be worksheets for the students to complete incomparing and contrasting the play and the film. Each booklet will also contain a different web article for extra information, and each booklet will require that the students practice working information (taken from either the play or their web articles) into summarized or paraphrased paragraphs.
Simply: this ain’t finished yet. I’ll provide a complete download of this booklet at the end of the week. Feel free to amend any of this as you see fit.
Let me know what I could do to make these handouts better.
Filed under: Lesson Plans, New Stuff, Questions, Teaching, Writing, handouts
I personally believe that this citation handbook is a fantastic idea. Learning how to cite sources and the importance of doing so should be taught at a young age. Not citing things can lead to serious circumstances in the future. For the most part I believe students do not properly cite things, because they either simply forget to or they are not sure how to and that is a very big issue. I agree that this handbook can be very useful when the students are entering high school as well as college. In fact, I feel that I myself could benefit from a citation handbook since sometimes it becomes quite difficult to remember the proper way to give credit to those who very much deserve it. I now plan on also creating a handbook for my students to refer to. I think a handbook is a much better idea than telling students to look online since many online sources are not very credible these days. Thank you for the wonderful idea!
As much as I feel that we may be pushing the kids a little too hard with MLA citation in 8th grade, I do agree with you that we should teach at least a little bit about where you get your information. A handbook like this will really only address these two main resources — books and websites — because I think these are going to be some of the only resources we have available in our school.
But still, those are the two main resources these kids will use in the future — they won’t get their information from journals, they’ll get all that online (and though that leads to more specific citation, this will give these youngsters the gist of what they need to look for).
Check out the next post, I’m asking for some help!
[...] this ain’t an easy task. The four handouts I posted yesterday will come in the middle of the booklet, and those pages focus more on how to cull information for a [...]
[...] Teaching, Questions, students, Writing. trackback Had a little more time today to devote to the MLA Handbook I’m creating for my students. The first two (or four) pages are discussed in the link above. [...]
Would you be interested in contributing to a wikipage with your citing documents?
I am creating a student wiki page for plagiarism, copyright and citing works correctly.
Can I post your pages, cite the work and link to your blog?
I would also like to take your paraphrase documents and re-create them in the wiki and have teams of students complete them so that different paraphrased examples would be available to others.
The wikipages are currently under rough construction, in the thought stages and something I would like to have available for interactive use in my Research class for 7th graders in September.
This is great! Nice work!
Great handouts on MLA citation explained in an 8th grader accessible kind of way. My one issue is with “citeawebsitep2.doc” the “Information in a Citation” list is a bit unclear. I cannot read #1 and #2 needs a label.
Thanks for the great resources.
Was the Handbook finished? If so, I would love a copy. I am teaching my 4th-6th graders the MLA format and can use all the help I can find. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. Recently it was added to our state standards for 5th and 6th grades. We decided to include the 4th since our school is grades 4-6.
Thanks for any help you can give.
Jane
Thanks for sharing these publicly! I shared them with my students in ENG 025 today at Ivy Tech Community College in Fort Wayne, IN. Thanks again! :) (I also loved the Boil your day into one sentence blogs, but don’t have enough time to read everything here: must run off to class!) :)
I love this MLA tool. Did you finish it?
Do you have a completed version of this booklet. It looks great, and I”m getting ready to teach a research unit. Thanks for sharing!
I think this looks great. Did you have a completed version? My class is just being introduced to MLA. I may try to create something like this for them. Great work :)
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