The first six levels of planet #4 focus on words with long vowels and a silent -e at the end. Although students are now familiar with initial and final consonant clusters after completing the levels making up the previous two planets, 52 of the 60 words in these levels follow a simple CVC + silent e pattern.

Although Rocket Spelling has only been live for a few days now, we had the chance to field test it before its public launch with a heterogeneous mix of about 100 students. Here is some of what those students, their teachers, and their parents had to say.

"For my nine year old son, Rocket Spelling sparked an interest in spelling that wasn't there before. He could hardly wait to learn the next set of words so he could move up through the levels. It's an invaluable tool for improving any child's spelling skills!" -Becky B., parent of a 3rd grade student

Here's a great review of Rocket Spelling from a 2nd grade teacher in California: https://mrreedteach.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/rocketspelling-com-a-spelling-practice-website/

The levels in planet #3 focus on final consonant pairs, blends, and digraphs. These levels assume that a student has already completed the levels on short vowels and initial consonant pairs and blends from the first two planets, so even though words with beginning and ending blends are explicitly the focus of level 3-12, those types of words (e.g. bring, thing, shark, plant) will be mixed in throughout the rest of the levels in planet #3 as well.

Tracking your students' progress on Rocket Spelling is simple and fun. While you are logged in to your teacher account, simply click on the progress tab. A massive spreadsheet with all of your students' results (by level) will appear. At a glance, you can tell which students are crushing tons of challenge levels, and which may need some additional support with certain patterns.

An important tip: To view even more information about a specific student's performance on any level, click on that cell in the spreadsheet!

After Working with Short Vowels in CVC formats in world 1, we now move to initial consonant pairs, digraphs, and blends in planet 2.

When you create an account on Rocket Spelling, one of the first things you'll need to do is set up your students' accounts. This can be done in the manage tab of your account.

We know you’re busy, so we’ve streamlined this process.

Out of the 120 different levels on Rocket Spelling (not including review challenges), 22 of them focus on high-frequency words. Whereas the other 98 levels are designed to help students practice a certain spelling pattern or work on a related set of words, these levels can seem more random. Although expert lists vary somewhat, the words in our high-frequency levels are generally all included in a list of the top 1,200 most frequently-used words in the English language. They are critical words for students to learn. But what's the best way for students to attack them?

For each set of words on Rocket Spelling, there are two types of levels: practice and challenge. The practice level is multiple choice, and words that are missed are re-tested later in the list. The challenge level is harder: students must type the word in themselves (without answer choices being provided), and they only get one try for each word.

For each word set, the challenge level is locked by default. A student must first beat the practice level for a certain set of words to unlock that particular challenge level.

The first six levels on Rocket Spelling (levels 1-1 to 1-6) focus on short vowels. The 60 words in these levels all follow either a basic consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern or are simply two-letter words that begin with a short vowel and end with a consonant (e.g. am, if, on, us).

Our primary goal in these levels is to ensure that students gain complete mastery of the short vowel sounds.