5.13.F

ELA5th GradeThe student engages in both short-term and sustained recursive inquiry processes for a variety of purposes.

The Standard

differentiate between paraphrasing and plagiarism when using source materials

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English Language Arts and Reading

Teacher's field guide

What Students Need to Do: Students tell whether a writer has restated source ideas in new wording and structure or copied them. They paraphrase accurately and identify the source instead of presenting borrowed ideas as their own.
What Mastery Looks Like: Given a source and a student response, students correctly label the response and point to evidence for their choice. They write an accurate paraphrase with new wording, new sentence structure, and a source note.
Common Misconceptions: Students may think swapping a few words or rearranging a sentence makes it a paraphrase. They may also think quotation marks alone give enough credit, or that ideas found online belong to everyone.
How to Assess It: Exit ticket: Read the source sentence, “Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood.” Decide whether “An octopus has blue blood and three hearts” is a paraphrase or plagiarism, explain why, then revise it.

Lesson moves

Give pairs a printed source paragraph and colored tiles; students cover key words, write from memory, compare sentence structure, and add a source note.
Ask students to write: Why is changing only three words still copying, and what should a writer do instead?
Play Paraphrase or Plagiarism: teams sort response cards, earn one point per correct label, and justify one choice.
Show a kid-friendly news article and its social media summary; students check whether the post credits and accurately restates the article.

Keep exploring

Grade, subject, topic, and the complete standard are prefilled. Create one free, no account needed.