Clause Combining
About This Worksheet
This Grade 7 Language Arts worksheet helps students combine short statements into clear complex sentences. Students use subordinating conjunctions or relative pronouns to show time, reason, contrast, description, or another relationship between ideas. The goal is to remove choppy repetition while keeping the meaning easy to follow. For example, “The rain started suddenly. We kept playing” can become “Although the rain started suddenly, we kept playing.”
Learning Goals
The main goal is to help students create complex sentences that show how two ideas connect. Students should already understand independent and dependent clauses. This activity moves them toward selecting words such as because, although, when, after, who, which, and that based on the relationship they want to express. It supports CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.7.1 and CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.7.3, which focus on sentence variety and effective language use.
Student Tasks
On this worksheet, students will combine eight pairs of short sentences into one complex sentence. They must use either a subordinating conjunction or a relative pronoun. The sentence pairs cover weather, schoolwork, hunger, movies, practice, libraries, shortcuts, and storms. Students should preserve both original ideas while making the new sentence smooth and correctly punctuated.
Common Challenges
Some students may join every pair with because even when the relationship is really time, contrast, or description. Others may create a run-on by placing the two clauses together without a connecting word or proper punctuation. Relative clauses can also become confusing if the pronoun does not clearly refer to the right noun. Encourage students to explain the relationship between the ideas before choosing the connector.
Teaching Suggestions
A teacher can list several relationship words under headings such as reason, time, contrast, and description. Students can choose the category first and then build the sentence. At home, a parent can read the two original statements and ask how one idea relates to the other. This keeps the focus on meaning before grammar.
Worksheet Features
The worksheet includes eight paired statements with long lines for full sentence rewrites. Directions allow students to use either subordinating conjunctions or relative pronouns, encouraging sentence variety. The prompts are simple enough that students can focus on structure rather than difficult content. This page works well for sentence combining, writing fluency, grammar review, or homework.