I will let the experts give the practical lessons.
Here's my theory part :
As explained earlier, you need to have both the subject and blue sky to be within the dynamic range of your camera's sensor.
Therefore, you need to understand Dynamic range and exposure first. In many situations, the dynamic range of the scene is easily more than 12 stops but just that our eyes are able to adjust and get correct exposure as we focus our eyes. Most sensors on digital cameras can only capture 7-9 stops of different intensity of light only. If the scene's dynamic range is 12 and your camera can only capture 8 stops, then regardless of how you meter, 4 stops of the scene will either be exposed as total blacks or blown out whites (that's why we often see pictures with blown out white skies when the foreground subjects are properly exposed).
A good read :
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/dynamic-range.htm
This means that if the real world we can see with our eyes without any pupil size changes to regulate the amount of light (i.e. 1 constant exposure) is classified as 1 to 14 stops in dynamic range (brightness), you can only capture about 8 of them on your sensor
.it means that the dynamic range you can capure on your camera is only be 1-8 or 2-9 or 3-10 or 4-11 or 5-12 or 6-13 or 7-14. If you set your camera exposure to capture no. 6-7 as midtone (of course indirectly through the use metering and camera settings etc.), then 3-10 in the real world (i.e. 8 stops) would be captured as the 8 stops on your camera. No. 3 will be captured as almost black and 10 as almost white. Anything below 3 in the real world is captured as black and anything above 10 as blown out white.
So first of all, you need to get everything in the scene to be within that 8 stops of your camera. To capture a scene within 8 stops, you can either choose the right time of the day and camera facing so that the whole scene is not more than 8 stops in dynamic range or reduce the dynamic range of the scene by the use of fill flash or light reflectors (set up to reflect sun light onto the subject) on the less bright areas if they are near enough to be flashed or reflected.
Even when the dynamic range of the scene is within 8 stops, you also need to expose correctly so that the 8 stops of the scene falls nicely within the 8-stops of your cameras image sensor. If they don't match, then the same problem of over- or under-exposure of some areas will occur. For e.g. if the brightest object (e.g. the sun) in the scene is metered using spot metering on automatic exposure without any compensation, it will be exposed as midtone and about the next 4 stops less bright than the brightest will be captured as under-exposed and the rest (i.e. the darkest 3 stops or so in the scene) as totally black (This makes it a silhouette shot).
Instead, you should try to have the midtone of the scene exposed as midtone in your camera so that the darkest and brightest in the 8-stop scene fall nicely within the extremes of the dynamic 8-stop range of your camera. In the aforesaid example, if youre using aperture priority, you may still be able to get the 8-stop scene correctly exposed if you use +3 EV (exposure compensation which tells the camera in any auto exposure mode now to increase the exposure by 3 stops, in this aperture priority case, has the effect of setting a shutter speed to 3 stops slower than having the metered bright object as midtone) so that the brightest object which you have used for spot metering will be moved 3 stops brighter to be at the top end of the 8-stop range of your camera and the rest of the brightness also get moved up accordingly.
Some people may use manual exposure (as well as manual control of flash power if theyre using fill flash(es)) and also do exposure bracketing.
Whatever exposure and metering mode you use and whatever you choose to meter in a 8-stop scene is not important. What is critical is making the necessary adjustments to get the midtone of the scene to be captured as midtone in your camera. It can only be done if you understand what your camera does at different exposure modes (manual, shutter priority, aperture priority etc.) and metering methods, and then also after considering the effect of fill flash/reflectors etc., make the necessary camera adjustment to get the whole scene to fall nicely at 8-stops of the cameras sensor.
At the end of the day, you need to understand exposure and its relationship with metering methods on the camera well before you decide on how to go about capturing the scene within the 8 stops of your camera. You may want to do some reading on exposure, metering methods and dynamic range.