What makes up a sentence

There will always be lessons that I am not thrilled about. I try to finagle a way to not teach a certain topic, but eventually I run out of reasons so I might as well dive right in. One such lesson was on clauses...ugh! To be honest I struggle sometimes with the reasons why students need to be taught certain lessons. Why in the world do they need to know the difference between main and subordinate clause? Originally, I thought teaching students to identify clauses would be pointless and a giant waste of time.  Then I slowly changed my mind as I thought of ways to teach this topic and how it would benefit them. 

We first began by just defining what made up a sentence. They filled out notes in their notebooks. Then we used the Smart board to sort all the different types of sentences. 

Next, they were given an article and they had to identify main and subordinate clauses as they read. They had to circle conjunctions that would help them identify the clause. 

For the last step in this lesson,  I copied the sentences they identified in the article as to having a main or subordinate clause and passed out highlighters. We read the sentences out loud and they highlighted what portion of the sentence was main or subordinate. This lesson took at least three days to complete, but once it was over I was glad I decided to teach clauses.

This lesson eventually lead the 8th graders to a show and not tell lesson.