Levels 9-3 and 9-4 deal with verbs ending with -ing and -ed, some of which double their final consonant before the -ing or -ed ending. The words in level 9-3 are swimming, running, winning, throwing, washing, mailing, kicking, listening, hopping, and sitting. The words in level 9-4 are mixed, covered, enjoyed, compared, planned, tapped, dropped, tagged, stopped, and tipped. The general pattern here is that verbs which end with a short vowel + a single consonant will tend to have that final consonant be doubled when an -ing or -ed ending is added to the word.

Planet 9 focuses on verbs. Level 9-1 begins with present tense verbs that are also high-frequency words (touch, leave, represent, describe, pull, laugh, suggest, decide, climb, and finish). Level 9-2 moves to verbs that end with a silent e which drops when an -ing ending is added. The words in this level are dancing, driving, making, loving, caring, hoping, riding, smiling, saving, and serving.

Levels 8-5 through 8-8 focus on homophones.

These levels, ideally, would be a resource for teachers to use alongside some instruction about homophones. Although the fact that we always put words in context with a sentence to support their meaning is especially helpful when it comes to homophones, we still encourage additional vocabulary work on these tricky words. An art project like the one shown below, where each student illustrates one homophone pair, would work beautifully alongside these Rocket Spelling levels!

We are excited to announce that for the entire month of November, we will be offering a coupon code that takes an incredible 50% off of your total annual membership cost! Whereas Rocket Spelling usually costs $3 per student for an annual membership, now you can get Rocket Spelling for an entire year for just $1.50 per student! To take advantage of this great deal, just enter coupon code '50off' at checkout.

As we head into November, we have a brand-new coupon code for new customers joining Rocket Spelling. When you register, use coupon code 'free14' to get a free 14-day trial classroom account on Rocket Spelling. We trust that you'll find Rocket Spelling to be an engaging way to gamify and differentiate your students' spelling practice, all while giving you immediate feedback on how each student is performing.

We're going to keep this post short and sweet: Today is the final day to get a free classroom account on Rocket Spelling! Anyone who registers by midnight Eastern time tonight and uses coupon code 'rocketlaunch' will receive a free classroom account good for the entire 2017-2018 school year. After midnight, this coupon code will expire, and new customers will only be able to get a 14-day free trial instead. With that in mind, sign up today, and spread the word to your colleagues yet today so they can take advantage of our free offer!

We've received word from a few folks that when they tried to add individual students to their account, they had trouble with the "save" button being grayed out after they have added their information. The issue is that you must fill all of the fields and then click out of the final one for the save button to become clickable again. For a 22-second demonstration of this, check out this video.

As we mentioned in a blog post last week, the Founding Story of Rocket Spelling is pretty compelling: it all began as one high school student's quest to help future students have a better experience learning to spell than what he experienced.

Recently, this story was detailed in another excellent article.

Levels 8-1 through 8-3 all focus on plural nouns. Level 8-1 focuses on words that either add -s or -es to the end when they become plural. Level 8-2 focuses on two types of plural patterns: y --> ies and f --> ves. Level 8-3 focuses on irregular plurals. Finally, level 8-4 reviews all of these types of plural nouns.

Here at Rocket Spelling, we believe that students learn best when they are fully engaged in the subject matter they are learning. Our favorite way to get students engaged in learning is by gamifying the content being taught -- in our case, by turning spelling practice into a game.

You'll notice, though, that students' time spent on Rocket Spelling isn't filled with long, distracting game play episodes. Instead, the students are practice spelling all of the time, but that spelling practice occurs within the framework of a game.