Watching my daughter learn to read and write has reminded me that English is just so darn hard. When explaining why onion is not spelled unyin (as she logically wrote on my grocery list) or why right is pronounced rite, the only reason I can come up with is "That's English!" A friend who has a child in a Spanish-English dual language program said her daughter is reading fluently in Spanish but not in English, because Spanish is phonetc. Sometimes I marvel at the fact that people learn to read and write (and spell correctly) in English at all. I, of course, see some of the patterns and word roots (and maybe would see more if I'd ever studied Latin), but to a child just learning to read, they must seem like roadblocks thrown up just to frustrate her.
How do you deal with English's myriad exceptions when teaching new readers and writers?