Teaching MLA

Did I write about this before? A teacher asked about it again: "How in the world do I teach MLA formatting and Works Cited?"  So I started digging. Turns out that I already created a bunch of stuff for this. Why can't I remember what's in my google drive?

Here's what I wrote in the email to her:

There are two things you are to teach (TEKS) with this…documenting sources and formatting written materials.

Formatting written materials is EASY – use a template! That’s what we do in grad school. Have everyone get up their document and model the steps you need to make  to create the template.(Margins, Header, Footer, Cover Page, Headings, Works Cited, Font, Spacing, etc.)  Then have them all save it on the desktop and save as each time they need to write a new paper.

 

For citing resources, the only thing that really works is to take the citation and put it on a colored sentence strip. Then you cut that thing up and make them put it back together – spaces (use the underscore _ as a placeholder), punctuation, and everything – for each kind of citation. Then create generic citations like title, page number, etc. and have them piece together the citations. Also have them label existing citations. Then they are ready to write them. Once that's complete, you are ready to have the kids (edit) do a two finger check for the citations. They take the sentence strip (or accurate citation) and put their writing hand on their citation with a pencil. They put their other hand on the sentence strip model citation. If there is a discrepancy, they mark their own with the pencil to correct it.

And here's the link to some resources.