Into the Classroom: How Do You Teach Conventions with the Invitations Process?

The author’s sentence and our conversations around it will begin to teach grammar and conventions—and more. Though this process can be done in different ways, the authors found it most effective to start by scheduling each step of the invitation process in approximately ten-minute time slots across a week or so. They also found it beneficial to share these lessons early in the day, so our young writers will have ample opportunity to apply the lesson focus across the day and curriculum. In the classroom, the invitational process commences when they display the selected sentence. At this point, they still haven’t written the focus phrase on the board or shared it with students. They don’t mark up model sentences during this process because it can be distracting to learners, looking like some sort of abstract syntax surgery.