The Main Clause - PowerPoint

The teaching resource titled "The Main Clause" is a comprehensive PowerPoint designed to educate students on identifying and using main clauses in sentences. The objectives of the resource are twofold: firstly, to help students recognise the main clause within a sentence during reading activities, and secondly, to assist them in using the main clause to create well-structured sentences in their writing. A main clause is defined as a group of words containing a verb or verb phrase that conveys the central idea of a sentence and can stand alone as a simple sentence, such as "My wife is a doctor." This serves as a fundamental concept for understanding sentence structure.

The resource also delves into more complex sentence construction by introducing subordinate clauses. These clauses provide additional information but cannot stand alone as they do not make complete sense by themselves. An example given is "My wife, who is younger than me, is a doctor," where "who is younger than me" is a subordinate clause. To reinforce understanding, students are presented with exercises to identify the main clause in complex sentences. For instance, they are asked to highlight the main clause in sentences like "Daniel, who was the bravest of the group, knocked on the door" and "Sarah, the best netball player in the school, has been picked to play for England." These exercises are designed to check students' comprehension and to practice distinguishing main clauses within the context of longer, more intricate sentences.