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Please Don't Plagiarize! Not Ever!
I encourage fellow teacher leaders to post their original "best practice" resources somewhere on-line for other teachers to discover.

This page is for my students out there who are considering not writing original words down when completing their assignments. To copy another's work and try to pass it off as your own is a very serious offense; it's called plagiarism. It is both wrong and it demonstrates a lack of respect towards education that you all know I don't tolerate.

I will teach you not to put others' ideas into your own words. I will teach you not to plagiarize. It takes a bit of knowledge and lots of practice to learn to do it in your actual writing assignments, but we will get there.

You're actually lucky. When I was in school, our teachers didn't really take time to teach us how to put research into our own writing without plagiarizing. In elementary, I wrote a lot of reports that had sentences in them that were copied right out of an encyclopedia. We didn't know any better back then. In today's world with so much information right at our fingertips, learning to "put it in your own words" is a much more important skill than it used to be.

For your amusement, I have posted pages from two reports I wrote in fifth grade. Keep in mind, we weren't given much instruction on how to write about research. Feel free to send me some advice on how I might have made my work sound like it didn't come right out of an encyclopedia.

Wow! Do you kids today even know what an encyclopedia is? I wonder...

My Fourth Grade Report on George Washington
	If you are up for the challenge, I dare you to click on, then print out this page from my report. Bring it to class and show me how you'd change some of the sentences to give them your (or my) personality.
I got an A+ on this report, and I'm not sure why. I copied too much from the encyclopedia to call this writing my own. My title could have been a lot more interesting too.

My Fifth Grade Report on Argentina
	If you are up for the challenge, I dare you to click on, then print out this page from my report. Bring it to class and show me how you'd change some of the sentences to give them your (or my) personality.
I got an A- on this report, and it is clearly the most plagiarized piece of writing any fifth grader ever turned in! My husband shows this to teachers he works with when he teaches classes to them.

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