Plagiarism is not allowed in school, college or work, so it is best to teach students how to use resources at an early age. The most straightforward explanation to teach is that if a student uses information in homework or a paper that he gains from a book, website or TV program, then he must give that resource credit. Teachers have different rules for how they want an elementary student to cite a source. For this young age, stick with the basics and have students include the author’s name, the name of the website or book and the year it was published.
Teaching elementary students about plagiarism is complicated because there is intentional and unintentional plagiarism. When a student copies or knowingly passes off someone else’s work as his own, it is intentional plagiarism. Yet, sometimes plagiarism is accidental. Elementary students may believe they have rewritten information to make it sound original. Students must understand that even when they put information into their own words, they need to list the source.
Most schools, even at the elementary school level, have strict policies against plagiarism. When a student gets caught, he may lose credit for his work, receive detention, get suspended or worse. Within most school systems, it is up to the classroom teacher and school administrators to determine what discipline measures are taken based on the severity of the incident. The level of punishment reflects whether the plagiarism was intentional or not. At the elementary school level, the student usually needs only to have explained why her actions counted as plagiarism and then rework the assignment.
You do not want the library or encyclopedias to make students nervous. When teaching elementary school students about plagiarism, stress that it is fantastic that they are learning new information from experts. Just remind them that they need to show where they found the information. One way to help them understand plagiarism is to have them do a project in which they are not allowed to directly copy information. An activity to help them learn about referencing is having them select a theme and find poems or literary works that support it. They then must write an essay that explains why the literary works relate to their theme. At the end of the paper, they need to list all the works used for their essay.