Teaching Embedded Clauses

One of my favourite things to teach Year 7 or 8 is the embedded clause. It sounds boring but it's relatively simple and students always have fun with the idea of manipulating language in unexpected ways. Embedded clauses can be taught effectively in thirty minutes or so in just three steps.

Step 1: Model an embedded clause

An example, inspired by Louis Sachar's Holes but not actually in the text:

Mr Sir squinted in the moonlight, his hand wavering over his gun, and told Stanley to get out of the way.

The embedded clause in this case is the middle part of the sentence that sits between the commas. The function of this clause is to add additional information to the situation, and it turns the line from a compound sentence to a complex one. 

An easy way of explaining the clause to students is to ask them to remove it from the sentence and then read aloud what remains to see if it still makes sense. If it does, the removed section was an embedded clause and the sentence itself was a successfully complex one.

Students should copy the above modelled sentence, highlight the embedded clause, and label it as such. 

Step 2: Scaffolding an embedded clause

The next step is to provide a sentence without an embedded clause and to ask students where such a clause could be inserted. It's important to make it a bit silly to offset the dryness of an activity focused on grammar. Here is such a sentence:

Spaghetti O'Jones laughed and grabbed a hold of the tortoise.

Students will start to get a feel for this by nominating places where a clause could go. The 'his hand wavering over the gun' clause from the Holes sentence works well enough as an example for discussion purposes. The [ ] indicates potential places to add the clause, and commas have been inserted accordingly to show students how to potentially punctuate it as well:

[ ], Spaghetti O'Jones, [ ] , laughed , [ ] , and , [ ] , grabbed a hold of the tortoise , [ ] .

For the ones at the beginning and end, this can be an opportunity to talk about 'reversibility' with complex sentences. If the sentence still works with the clauses reversed then students can label it correctly as a complex sentence.

Anyway, students then pick one of the following clauses below and insert it in one of the above spots. 

• EG. Spitting pasta everywhere
• EG. Sneezing uncontrollably
• EG. Kicking over the daffodils
• EG. Something else of student's choice

I would take this opportunity to walk the room and read the new sentences students create, laughing or marveling with them at what they've been able to put together.

Step 3: Without Training Wheels

Students then use an embedded clause to create their own sentence from scratch. 

Disclaimer: The above activity was written specifically for this blog.