Spell a BALL

Now that my 3 year old niece Hima had learnt all the letters in the English alphabet, and tries to read upper case letters one by one in newspapers and magazines, I thought I should start teaching her spellings of small words that she knows already.

I started with 3 letter words starting from A, B, C... On a sheet of paper, I wrote
A N T
B A T
C A T
D O G
and went on making her read, and telling the pronunciation.
A-N-T – ant, I would say, Ant means ‘iruve’ (kannada synonym)
B-A-T – bat, Bat means? Her response was to show Sachin Tendulkar’s’s bat on TV, where he was playing a match with Aussies.
C-A-T – cat, and she would say ‘meaow meaow’, excitedly
And similarly ‘bow wow’ for dog.

Then suddenly she wanted to write BALL. She wanted me to spell out the word so that she would write.
Okay, I dictated to her, B, A, L, L.
And she had written BAL.
I told her to write another L
But she showed me the already written single L.
Hmm... I thought and told her ‘You should write 2 L’s for BALL’

Immediately she wrote something and showed it to me, gleaming in joy that she could write a word. I couldn’t stop from cuddling her seeing what she had written.....