I am glad that some schools are doing something about Internet searching. Not sure how to enforce that though. Now you can Google just about any topic and kids know that. The problem is that kids tend to cut and paste rather than rewrite the material in their own voice. It is so easy for them to do and so hard for teacher to find out. In high school, sometimes teachers send the student writings to private company to do plagiarism check. The students will fail the class if they get caught.
Parents should involve with kid's project. Just try not to overdo it. I have seen some 3-D models which clearly can not be done without parents' help. The parent involvement usually decrease as they get older and more capable doing research on their own. I think that it is okay for parents to play the role of "research assistant" who pre-reading books, searching Internet, making photocopies, highlighting the relevent information, etc. You can certainly give suggestions and make minor corrections for them. But it is kids' job to write the paper.
