10-minute time filler: The longest sentence

Today, my 8th graders completed their worksheet on relative clauses ten minutes before the end of class. To keep them occupied, I challenged them to write “monster sentences.” On the board, I demonstrated how to divide a normal sentence into parts and extend each part:

The man gave his mother a flower.
The man / gave / his mother / a flower.
The young, good-looking man who had red hair and lived in a gray house / sweetly gave / his old, sad mother, whose other children never called nor visited her, / a bouquet of yellow flowers to show how much he loved her.

That’s 39 words. The winning sentence in my class, with 58 words, was this one:

The woman watched TV with her cat. -> The old, retired, nice and kind woman, beloved by everybody, watched the old, black-and-white, huge, loud TV with total affection with her big, heavy, fat, striped, red, Persian cat which was eating small fish from his painted green catplate which was bought in the newest and biggest supermarket opened on the corner of Mary Queen of Scots Lane.