As an English teacher, I struggled to teach my students to use MLA citations. Why? Students didn’t see the need for citing. They failed to understand its purpose and if students don’t comprehend the purpose of a task, they often don’t put forth their best efforts to accomplish it.
In South Carolina, tenth graders take the High School Assessment Program (HSAP) test during their spring semester. As part of the ELA section, the research questions can include the proper form for MLA citations. So, although I prefer to use citation generators like BibMe and KnightCite, I know that our students need practice in creating citations to prepare them for THE TEST. (Please don’t shoot me – I don’t agree with THE TEST, but it is a reality, and if I am not doing my part to prepare our students for it, then I can’t look teachers in the eye when I offer to assist them meet their objectives.)
The World of Citation
Last February, an awesome post appeared in my Google Reader from K-M the Librarian, Sara Kelley-Mudie. In order to impress the importance of citation to her students, she used a great analogy: citations are the addresses where the resources reside.
Please take a moment to go read her post – it is darned well worth it and I can wait while you read it.
Now- wasn’t that awesome?! Doesn’t she inspire you to approach citations from a different perspective?
Switching Things Up
The next time you are preparing to teach citation, why not use K-M’s plan and begin with the address analogy? Then show her Slideshare presentation (it’s awesome, too!).
Online Citation Games
You can find several games online to further reinforce the proper formatting of citations. I must thank Karen Hill, media specialist at Byrnes High School, for introducing me to these games. (Karen probably does not even realize that she “hooked me up” with the games as I found them on her website!) I have linked to two of these from our library’s website.
Informania 
February 3, 2012 at 11:26 pm
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February 4, 2012 at 5:30 pm
Thanks for your inspiring post! Can’t wait to change my approach to citation.
February 19, 2012 at 11:51 am
I will be trying some of your ideas with my middle schoolers and will share this with our faculty. I have a similar activity to your color coded strips. I put parts of a bibliography on large sentence strips and passed them out to students in groups. Then, students had to arrange the citation properly and each group had to go up to the front of the classrroom and hold their citation parts in the correct order. We made it like the Price Is Right Game where the rest of the class would tell the group how many errors they made if any. The group could then reposition themselves according to the feedback. It was fun. This is a great post about something that is normally mundane and tiresome to teach. Thanks for the fresh spin.
February 19, 2012 at 2:16 pm
Love your Price is Right idea! I had thought I might do something similar, but ran out of time before I had to teach the lesson.
Might be fun to give groups jumbled citations and do a “Beat the Clock” type activity with a timer. The group that correctly positioned themselves the faster would be the winners.
Anything to spice up the teaching of citation!
Really want to work on fun ideas for teaching in-text citation.
February 12, 2013 at 8:24 pm
[…] one day as I was browsing for a couple minutes (hours) on Pinterest, I came across this blog entry: Put Some Excitement into Citations . I love the citation idea and it really got me thinking about ways to incorporate this hands on […]
June 25, 2013 at 11:14 am
[…] was also in the same predicament as I was. Bless his soul, this teacher was nice enough to compile a list of references, analogies, and wheeeee! exercises that would make the citation and reference lesson not only clear, but much more interesting and […]
September 12, 2013 at 3:20 am
[…] quoting, a good and responsible writer always cites his sources. Citations or references are the addresses where resources reside- you must always give credit where it is due. Learning how to cite prevents […]
September 27, 2013 at 8:38 pm
You’ve really inspired me to make citing sources “ex-citing.”
February 19, 2015 at 5:38 am
Thanks for the ideas! Love the puzzle idea and thought that a citation tells where the resource lives.
September 15, 2015 at 2:26 pm
Do you have a copy of the “puzzle that you created?”
Thanks,
January 24, 2016 at 4:59 pm
I can check; I know I had it on my computer at work.
January 24, 2016 at 3:04 am
I haven’t put it together yet, but one example I thought of was playing some songs that sample others work – like Fall Out Boy’s “Uma Thurman” or “Centuries”. Then, show them an article on Sam Smith “Stay With Me” and talk about how much money he lost because the courts decided he “plagiarized” the song. While most of our kids won’t be rock stars, it is a good example of real world issues.
January 9, 2018 at 2:40 am
Thank you for your resource! I plan to use this tomorrow!