My kid started bilingual school at grade 1. Because his native language is phonetically spelled, it took him a while to understand that English is not. Some spellings he could not shake; my favorite was "peapole" for "people" which persisted into second grade.

I was very annoyed to hear the English teacher (they recruited monoglot English teachers so they wouldn't take the easy path) say "English spelling is hard". The right answer is that "English spelling is only loosely phonetic".