Spelling Bee Words for Elementary Students

What Are Spelling Bee Words for Elementary?

For elementary school kids, spelling bee words are typically reviewed in kindergarten through 5th grade, the period in which most kids have their first spelling bee experience. The words for kindergarten through 2nd grade are short, mostly one- and two-syllable "everyday words" that follow regular patterns of phonetic correspondence between sounds and letters. By 3rd and 4th grade, the list includes multisyllabic words, many common prefixes and suffixes, and some of the earliest Latin words borrowed into English. Fifth-grade words are ones kids really have to study, with irregular sound-letter correspondences, double consonants, and silent letters.

The Wordineer Elementary Spelling Bee Generator gives parents and teachers instant access to 1,000+ words used in Elementary School spelling bees (grade K-5), including definitions, syllable count, and word origin information for each word. This tool is intended for parents to use with their children for home practice and for teachers to organize school spelling bee practice — NOT for students to practice spelling on their own. Every time Generate is clicked, a brand new random list of words is generated to study.

Why Use This Tool for Elementary Spelling Bee Practice?

The majority of spelling bee word resources are static — meaning they are the same list every time you come back to them, offering no filtering or the ability to select words suitable for your child's specific grade.

Individual grade targeting. The grade levels are listed individually (Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, 3rd Grade, 4th Grade, and 5th Grade), not in bands of levels (e.g., K-1, 2-3, 4-5). This way, parents can select words for their 2nd Grader without sorting through the 5th-grade words, and a teacher coaching 4th Graders doesn't have to go through the Kindergarten words.

Practice Mode for parent-led sessions. Practice Mode runs a real spelling bee round! I read the word aloud, you have your child spell it, you click Show Definition to verify how it was spelled, and then you click Next Word to have the next word in the list displayed. It is as easy as that, and you don't even have to hold a printed list of words and cover up each word as you read it.

Difficulty tiers that match real school bees. The "Easy" list includes the most common words used in elementary school spelling bees, often found in students' everyday reading. The "Medium" tier includes words found in many school-based spelling bee competitions, where students have typically been studying spelling for several weeks. The "Hard" tier includes words that are less common and that may require students to have knowledge of roots and rules in order to spell them correctly.

Free and printable. This is a FREE online word list generator — there are no accounts to open, NO paywalls to get around, and you can generate word lists as often as you like. When you're ready to print out a list of words, just click on the "Print List" link, and you'll get a clean and numbered list that you can use in the classroom or for individual practice sessions.

How to Use This Tool

1. Select a grade. Choose your child's current grade from the Grade dropdown list. You can also select a grade for next year to get an idea of the vocabulary your child will need to master next year. You can also select a grade above your child's current grade to create 'stretch' word lists for your child.
2. Set up the words to be spelled by choosing the difficulty level. For a first session with a new grade level, choose 'Easy'. Once your child can spell all the 'Easy' words correctly, change to 'Medium'. The hardest words of all are best left until the last week before the competition and are chosen as 'Hard'.
3. Choose a count of words to include in the practice session (15 words is the standard but can be reduced to 10 words for younger students such as Kindergarten to 2nd grade students and increased to 25-30 words for competitive older students such as 5th grade students).
4. Click Generate and instantly you will be shown a random list of words to practice, meeting your criteria.
5. Practice Single Words. Click Practice Mode in the results to practice individual words from your session. In Practice Mode, you read a word out loud, have your child spell it, click "Show Definition", then click "Next" to go to the next word.
6. Save words to review again later. There is a heart in the right corner of each word. Click on the heart to add that word to your saved words for the session. Copy saved words to notes, or copy to a study list also.
7. Print for classroom use. Select the words you'd like to print off and click on the "Print List" button at the bottom of the page. The resulting page is a clean numbered list that can be read from during the class bee.

What Elementary Spelling Bee Words Look Like by Grade

Early reader words in Kindergarten are very short. Most of these words are one syllable with very common consonant-vowel patterns. They are mostly words that kindergarten children hear every day. For example: cat, run, jump, blue, look, help, play.

1st grade words include two-syllable words as well as words with blends (bl-, cr-, st-) and digraphs (ch, sh, th) in them. As with kindergarten words, most 1st-grade words are highly regular and include many instances of phonetic spelling. Examples of words that a 1st grader might read include happy, green, seven, garden, bring, and circle.

2nd grade — Words with Silent Letters and more Complex Vowel Combinations: In 2nd grade, students will encounter words that have silent letters as well as words that contain vowel combinations such as -oa-, -ea-, and -ou-. In addition, longer two-syllable words will be encountered that require attention to the middle syllable. Examples of words that 2nd grade students will read are: captain, perfect, between, special, and toward.

3rd Grade words, once again, appear in School Bee contests. Many of these words include Latin prefixes and suffixes such as un-, re-, -tion, and -ful. Many of the words also include double consonants and less typical vowel patterns. Words from this level would include enormous, adventure, distance, famous, and machine.

4th Grade: The vocabulary that elementary school students read can no longer be read with the tactics of kindergarten through 3rd grade. Most words have Latin roots and need to be learned as complete words. Silently held letters are found frequently in the words of 4th Grade. Examples include necessary, ancient, comfortable, separate, and receive.

5th Grade: The serious elementary competitor studies vocabulary for 5th Grade. This includes words with Greek and Latin roots as well as words with irregular spellings that are only understood by knowing the origin of the word. There are also many multi-syllable words that have to be spelled out syllable by syllable. Examples of these words are: pneumonia, exaggerate, silhouette, accomplish, dictionary.

How to Manage Elementary Spelling Bee Preparation

Practice 15 minutes a day (up to 20 minutes for 4th/5th graders) for 3-4 weeks prior to the competition. Younger students practice for 15 minutes; older students can do longer sessions and practice for 20 minutes. The more important factor is consistent practice rather than longer sessions.

Follow an Easy → Medium → Hard sequence of words. Spend 3-4 weeks practicing Easy words to learn basic spelling and build up fluency in your student's writing. In week 2, step up to the Medium level. The Hard words are to be practiced in week 3. In the final week, mix up all of the words to really review them for their spelling bee.

Save words (by clicking on the heart icon) that your child missed in Practice Mode to use them as a missed-word list for future sessions. Use the saved words for the beginning of subsequent sessions to be reviewed before more words are generated for practice.

In addition to writing down the words for spelling practice, have your child orally spell out the words for you in practice rounds of a spelling bee. You say the word first, and then your child attempts to write it down letter by letter after that. Afterward, they can confirm they spelled the word correctly by reading it aloud.

For words your child misses in Practice Mode, add them to the list by clicking the heart icon. Then at the end of the session, copy the saved words to a running list for your child to start with in the next session rather than generating a new list of words for your child to practice.

In the last 48 hours or so leading up to the contest, do not add new words to practice. During this time, only review words you've already learned.

Best Practices for Teachers Running Classroom Spelling Bees

You can run a classroom bee with this tool in about 5 minutes.

• Generate separately by difficulty. Use the tool to generate an Easy list, print out the list of Easy words for early rounds of the bee, and then pull out a Medium list and print out the Medium words for the latter rounds of the bee — all without any manual curation to create a list of increasing difficulty.
• Randomize within rounds. Generate a new list for each practice session so kids don't gain an unfair advantage by memorizing a sequence of words from previous sessions.
• Use the origin filter for vocabulary lessons. Filter lists to show only 'Latin' or 'Anglo-Saxon' word roots. For example, when teaching 4th and 5th grade students studying word roots as part of their ELA curriculum, use the vocabulary lists for a classroom bee to focus on the root patterns as opposed to randomly selected words.
• Print the list in advance. The Print List button produces a simple, numbered list that can be used during the practice sessions and distributed to students after the session for them to review the words that were used in the practice session.
• Use Practice Mode on a shared screen. Display the tool on a projector or classroom screen. Enter Practice Mode. Read words one at a time from the Easy list for the first few rounds, and then switch to the Medium list for the remainder of the practice. Have students spell verbally in turn — just as in a real bee.

Understanding Word Origins at the Elementary Level

The word origin filter is more than a curious aside in language learning. For one, it is an extremely effective tool as preparation for any spelling competition. Children can predict that words of Latin origin end in -tion, -ance, -ent, or -ity. Words of Anglo-Saxon origin are generally more phonetically regular than those from French origin, which often have silent letters of unexpected kinds as well as endings such as -et, -eur, or -ette.

The origin filter is most useful for 4th- and 5th-grade elementary students. At these grades, Latin-root words comprise a good chunk of the Hard words in reading. Studying a list of words from a single origin family, such as Latin, helps students develop pattern recognition that can then be applied to words that they have never read before.

More Ways to Practice at Home

After having your child practice their word list on this page, there are several more tools available on Wordineer that can keep your child's spelling practice interesting without the pressure of timed rounds of drill. The Word Scramble page offers a single jumbled word for your child to unscramble. The Word Unscramble page allows your child to type in any scrambled word and find the answer. This page is particularly great for reviewing troublesome spellings that your child may have missed on their word list. For the older elementary student interested in building their vocabulary beyond their competition list, the Random Word Generator offers random words from the entire Wordineer database with definitions.