Reading and Writing "Hypertextually": Children's Literature, Technology, and Early Writing Instruction

This article begins by exploring the graphical, hypertextual, interactive elements of children’s literature, and then compares those elements to the charactertistics of writing taught in early elementary school writing instruction. Here, we can explore the forms, perspectives, characterizations, and subject matters being modeled through the teaching methods and through interactive writing (e.g., Button, Johnson, & Furgerson, 1996; Dorn, French, & Jones, 1998; McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 2000). There are mismatches between the ways in which children are taught to write and the materials they are currently reading. The purpose of this exploration is to find the places where contemporary writing instruction can be updated to include elements of hypertextual reading, meaning beyond printed words, multiple perspectives, and complexities of plot. In this exploration, we might begin to consider ways to extend the imaginative ranges of young students and we might begin to imagine possible changes to the ways we think about early elementary writing instruction.