Neighbour vs. Neighbor? Colour vs. Color? UK vs. US?

I know it's all English, but the UK people spell many words differently than the US people.


Since most of the books our children read are coming from the UK, these words are spelled differently and I wonder how this will affect the future of my kids.

1. Will they ever have the potential to win a spelling bee since we lived in Belgium and they learned to spell flavor with a 'u' as flavour?

2. How many words does this affect?

3. When does this confusion stop?

I'm starting to forget which one is correct (if there is even an actual "correct") and am conflicted on how to tell my children to spell these words. There are so many more words that are affected than we think! I googled this phenomenon and found there are so many words that I can't even begin to count them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences


We're talking honour, humour, favourite, theatre, centre, practise, defence...I'm telling you, the list goes on and on. I'm not confident that I could now pass a 4th grade spelling test since I've been here for over a year and am getting more and more confused by the day. Or is it confuzed?