THE Journal

IF YOU'VE RECENTLY spent any time as a student at Blattman Elementary School in San Antonio, then you're sure to have been exposed to "trash and treasure," a method of note-taking that Blattman librarian Linda Miller (see "The New Librarians," August) teaches kids to show them the proper way to do research while warning them about the evils of plagiarizing.

Before she begins the activity, which involves separating relevant from irrelevant information, Miller says she explains "how copying everything the author wrote is called plagiarism and is stealing, and that it is important to also write down where we get our information or cite our sources."

She tailors trash and treasure to each grade level. For example, she says she gets her point across to second-graders with a little role-playing. "I pretend that I've seen a beautiful drawing by a student and have asked the art teacher if I can hang it in the library. I use a blank piece of paper to represent the drawing, tape it to the wall, look around furtively, then pretend to erase the student's name and put my name on it. The students yell at me, 'That's not fair! That's stealing!' Second-graders are appalled by stealing. I explain that, yes, it is, and that if they do that with a book or some source, they will be doing the same thing."

Then it's on to the business of note-taking. Miller passes out copies of a page from a book or website on a topic related to the research the students will be doing. She uses an LCD projector that has a document camera attached so the students can watch her hand and pencil as she works with the text to demonstrate the trash-and-treasure technique.

"We go over the questions we want to answer so we know what we're looking for, then we read a sentence at a time from the printed text," she says. "If the information is relevant to a question, we circle the 'treasure,' or words we must have, and we 'slash the trash.'"

Once the students take the information from a source, they credit the source in the box provided on a data chart. The chart provides a format for students to jot down only pertinent information—the treasure—while citing where they got it from.

"The last step," Miller says, "is to take our 'treasure' and rewrite it in our own words into good sentences and paragraphs."