Fun With Spelling

Anika loves playing with words- learning how to spell, rhyme, etc. Today we were on the way home and she said, "Let's do Christmas tree." I asked if she wanted to figure out how to spell tree. She replied, "Christmas tree" rather emphatically. I told her that "Christmas" was a bit tricky, but we worked through it. Then I asked her to try tree. She said that she knew how it started- "c". I was perplexed because she really is very good with her letters and I thought this would be a gimme. As I started to say no, she came out with "h?", a little less sure of herself this time. That's when the lightbulb went on for me. All this time she has thought that the word was "ch-ree" and really, if you say "ch ree" and "tree" out loud, they pretty much sound the same. I was trying to explain to Anika how fascinating I thought this was (in addition to the fact that I was impressed that she understood the concept of "ch"), and how interesting it would be as she learned to read that some words might not be what she thought they were. She replied, giggling, "Yeah, like I could make cat A-C-T." Obviously that's not quite what I meant, but I was once again impressed that she was comfortable enough with the spelling of "cat" that she would mix it up and make a joke of it (such as it was).