Is my child learning? aka Kiko's English Class Saga Part 1

Kiko, my favorite 7-year-old nephew, has been speaking in English ever since he started speaking. His grammar is flawless and his accent is comparable to that of a native English speaker. We don't really know how it happened since most of the people in our family speaks in Tagalog. But we are definitely amused about this phenomena.

When he started schooling, his grasp of the English language helped him a lot through his preschool years. He started reading phonetically at age 3 and he can easily tackle big words at age 4. His reading comprehension is really ahead of his age. He loves reading about his favorite things like fishes, birds and trains and he spends most of his time making picture books about these things.

This year, Kiko entered Grade 1. My sister (his mother) and I, were quite apprehensive about how would Kiko fair in his Filipino subject. You see, here in the Philippines, Filipino is one of the subjects taught in the elementary and high school levels. And since, Kiko has been speaking in English most of his life, we were expecting that he would really have a hard time in his Filipino class.

And as expected, Kiko had really a confusing time learning his native language. It was really funny at first because Kiko would talk like a balikbayan. But luckily, Kiko got the hang of it and even though he still has the thwang, he can now properly conjugate the verbs in Tagalog.

Anyway, even with his new found love for the Filipino language, my sister and I were really expecting the worse on his report card. And boy were we surprised!!!! Kiko had a pretty good grade in Filipino and Sibika (Social Studies taught in the Filipino Language) but what shook us the most was the fact that Kiko got a grade of 78 in ENGLISH!!!!!

78??? An English grade of 78 for a little boy who spent most of his life talking in English? 78 for a boy who practically consumed several reams of bondpaper writing about his favorite things? Wow!!! Where on earth did this little boy's English teacher got his grade from?

(to be continued...)