Citations

Formal and Informal Citation
We cite sources to give credit to them. 
We cite sources to avoid plagiarizing.
Our seventh grade core requires you to understand how to use informal citation.

If you didn't know it before you read it, 

you need to cite it!

Formal:  Formal citations will include a bibliography(works cited page)  at the end of the paper, and will require carefully formated page set-up, footnotes, endnotes, etc. See an example of a paper written with formal MLA style: http://academictips.org/mla-format/mla-format-sample-paper/  Notice that this paper uses some signal phrases, too.

Informal:  For an informal citation, you tell where you got the information right in the sentence or sentences where you report the information.  
Seventh graders need to be able to use informal citation.  
You should also have a works cited list at the end of your report, but for today we will just collect URLs for our sources. 
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An informal citation has a signal phrase, 
as much information as you can get in about where you got the information, 
and a piece of important and easily understood piece of information about your subject. 

Example:   (signal phrase) According to (information about the source) Jaroslaw Bilocerkowycz, Ph.D in the article he wrote for World Book Online about Lithuania,  (a piece of important and easily understood piece of information about your subject) the Soviet Union took over Lithuania in 1940, it was invaded  by  the Germans in 1941 and the Lithuanians  attempted to establish their own government, but the Germans ruled until Russia regained control in 1944.  

(information about the source)David M. Glanz (signal phrase) reports (information about the source) in his World Book Online article "Gulag" that  (a piece of important and easily understood piece of information about your subject) the  "NKVD was the secret police force of Communist Russia and the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1943."