Plagiarism

Plagiarism is really serious. I wonder if it is considered plagiarism when a elementary student copy something from a book word from word. My daughter was in the third grade last year and she had to do an social studies project. She copied the information from the book word from word, and I fussed at her for doing it and told her it was plagiarism. She looked at me and asked 'What is that?" That's when I realized that she didn't know anything about it nor the teacher never explained to them what plagiarism is. In my opinion, they shouldn't be held accountable for something that they have no knowledge of: especially if it is not taught to them yet. I wasn't sure if they would get in trouble for writing it word for word, so I had her to write it over. The instructions for the social studies project didn't say anything about not copying the information from word to word.