Citing Sources

I'm sweating about choosing information from my sources for my research paper for my 504 class. I want to make sure I do it correctly and yet don't have a paper full of listed sources and quotation marks. So, I have to come up with my own words. That's the hard part for me since we got into this copyright issue. If I don't quote word for word, if I use my own ideas and words and then give a source that the idea came from, I should be okay. But somewhere in there is a grey area about my ideas. At what point are my ideas purely my own and not a combination of what I have read of someone else's ideas? I think for my own purposes, I get the difference. But how do you teach that to students?