Introduction:
We are living in an information age! Literacy is becoming an increasingly necessary set of skills for interacting in even the most basic parts of our society. Many of the jobs and success paths of the future will require your child to develop cognitive skills far beyond the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. This new information age makes learning more accessible through multimedia support, but the most important aspects still lie in the written word. Many of the jobs or success paths your child will face in the future haven’t been invented yet. Think back to how much education has changed since you were in elementary school. Could you have imagined a world in which every student had access to a laptop and the majority of their assessments were online exams? Sci-fi fans may have had some inclination, but most of us would have never imagined that the role social media now plays in our everyday lives. You may be thinking everything is now in a video format, so why is it important that my child learns how to read in print? It is true that much has changed and learning is definitely more accessible, but this creates a paradox in which the gap that divides is becoming wider by the second. Given the complexities of our world it is safe to assume that our children will need a more indepth ability to interact with information. This means they need a more sophisticated understanding of not only how our language works, but also the subtleties of how our language is used to influence outcomes.