Is your daughter going to try for the National Spelling Bee contest? I know she won a big one locally in St. Louis.
If she (Anna, 11) makes it, she makes it. But we're not going to push her or put pressure on her.
Anna is an excellent speller by "natural" means: she reads voraciously, she is learning Latin, etc. But to be a national champion speller, most of those kids have to spend a lot of time in "unnatural" means: just boning up on lists of odd words for hours and hours on end. That seems a bit artificial. Frankly, I don't care if Anna can spell "cyclazocine," "serrefine," "coryza," and "beccafico"--all words that came up in the contest but which even a well-educated person would never use in real life.