For first grade students still learning a whole host of new words, keep the list confined to monosyllabic words that speak to the season. Introduce words like bat, black, cat, witch, broom and spook through festive tales and poems that capture their attention. As the students graduate to a higher grade, the words themselves can graduate in complexity. Words like treat and scream teach children how to add a vowel to make the longer vowel sound, and those words with two syllables like pumpkin and spider widen their growing vocabulary.
By third and fourth grade your students are ready for complicated words such as ghoul, ghost or frightened. This is also a prime opportunity to introduce the concept of compound words, such as scarecrow, rainstorm and careless. Expand their vocabulary with spooky stories that include words like midnight, fearless, shallow, foggy or caution. Select action verbs like chase, burst, wander and report or use nouns like clothing, chimney, chute or even funeral.
As your students enter fifth grade and ultimately prepare to graduate from elementary to middle school, these children will not only require a bit more of a challenge but can tolerate the stronger words that might be inappropriate for those kids who are much younger. These kids are approximate ten years and over, and words like zombie, weapon and blood won't be as shocking. They are also better prepared for polysyllabic words such as adventure, foreshadow and Halloween.
Because there are many commonly misspelled words in the English language, any spelling bee list provides you the opportunity to include these words in your lesson plans and spelling bee preparation, even if the words themselves are not Halloween themed. Some of these words can be easily incorporated into the stories you may use to help teach the other words present. Include words such as again, because, challenge, could, enough, except, favorite, friends, guess, heard, know, people, quickly, quietly, quit, right, school, terrible, usually, wear, were, and whether.