Halloween word games for a class, with the words that actually work

The last week of October is the one time a teacher can run word games all week and have the class treat it as a treat. The vocabulary is seasonal, which means it is unusually familiar, which means rounds move quickly and nobody sits out.

Four games that work, and the words to use with them.

Why Halloween words play well

They are old words. Most of the vocabulary has been in English for centuries, and words that have been in the language a long time get worn smooth — short, common letters, plenty of repetition.

It shows in the scoring: the easy end of the Halloween list runs AUTUMN, CARAMEL, CHOCOLATE, DISGUISE, EERIE, FAMILIAR. Those are words a six-year-old can reach, which is what makes the week work for a mixed class.

The hard end is almost entirely borrowings — the words English took from elsewhere and never quite domesticated. They are where the rare letters live.

1. Hangman with the category announced

The obvious one, improved by one rule: say 'Halloween' before you start. The class is then reasoning about a few dozen candidate words rather than working alphabetically, which is the difference between a thinking exercise and a spelling test.

Take guesses by table rather than by hand so the whole room is in a conversation. Ten wrong guesses for infants, six for juniors.

2. Last letter, first letter

Go round the room; each child must say a Halloween word beginning with the last letter of the previous one. PUMPKIN, NIGHT, TREAT, TOFFEE.

It fails productively — children get stuck on words ending in awkward letters, and the stuck moment is when they start thinking about spelling rather than recalling. Allow a pass to keep it moving.

3. Build the word

Write a long seasonal word on the board and have the class make as many smaller words from its letters as they can in three minutes. DECORATIONS is the reliable one; it yields enough that every child finds something.

This is the game that helps weaker spellers most, because there is no single right answer to be wrong about.

4. Clue chains

Give the clue rather than the word and let the class guess, then ask them to write a clue for the next one. Writing a clue is harder than solving it — the child has to describe a thing without naming it, which is a genuine composition exercise in one sentence.

Every word on the Halloween list here has a clue written for exactly this, so the examples are to hand.

5. The clue is the puzzle

Give three words and one clue, and have the class decide which word the clue belongs to. It sounds trivial and is not — the wrong answers have to be plausible, which means thinking about what the clue does and does not say.

It is the quickest way to show a class what a good clue is, and a class that has thought about clues writes much better ones afterwards.

Use words from the same tier so the choice is not given away by length. Three easy words of similar size is the version that works.

Keeping it the right side of frightening

The vocabulary splits into costume-and-sweets Halloween and horror Halloween, and the list on this site stays firmly on the first side. For an infant class, pick from the easy tier and you will stay there automatically — the frightening words are nearly all long ones.

If a child offers something darker, it is usually worth taking the word and moving on rather than making an issue of it. The alternative is a discussion about what counts as scary, which is not the lesson.

Using the week for spelling that lasts

Seasonal vocabulary is the easiest thing in the year to teach and the easiest to lose, because it is not used again for eleven months. If you want any of it to stick, pick the words that are not only seasonal — the ones that turn up in ordinary writing too.

Those are the ones worth putting on the wall. A word that appears again in November has been learned; a word that does not has been enjoyed, which is also fine but is a different thing and worth being honest with yourself about.

A five-minute plan for the Friday

Three rounds of category hangman from the easy tier, one round of build-the-word on DECORATIONS, and finish with last-letter-first-letter until the bell. That is the whole week's seasonal filler and it needs no preparation beyond opening the list.

Making it last the week

Run one game a day rather than four on the Friday. The vocabulary is small enough that a class saturates on it quickly, and a word met on Monday and guessed on Thursday is a word that has been learned rather than seen.

Keep a running list on the board of every word that has come up. By Thursday the class is reasoning from it, which is when the week stops being filler and starts being revision.

One thing to avoid

Setting a word nobody has met because it is seasonal. SAMHAIN and PSYCHOPOMP are excellent hangman words and terrible classroom ones — a round nobody can enter is where the attention goes, whatever time of year it is.