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.

Planet 7 is different from all of the others: instead of having students work on words that follow certain spelling patterns, the words in this planet are arranged by topic. These are critical words for students to be able to spell: the basic numbers, colors, days, names of family relationships, parts of the body, school-specific terminology, and more. Although this planet might require fewer specific teacher-directed minilessons, we think it is a critical set of levels for students (of virtually all ages) to practice.

Level 6-9 goes back to a final tricky vowel pair combo: the infamous -ie vs. -ei pair. Everyone knows the old "i before e except after c" line, "except in words that say 'a' as in neighbor and weigh." Many memes have been made about the limitations of this rule, however (see below).

For students who manage to conquer all of the levels on Rocket Spelling, we thought a celebratory certificate might be in order. So we've designed one! If you are interested in downloading a copy of our Rocket Spelling congratulatory certificate, please click here.

Additionally, if you have students who conquer all of the Rocket Spelling levels, we'd love to help you celebrate their achievement by making them famous on our Twitter and Facebook accounts!

Levels 6-6 and 6-7 focus on some word endings that students sometimes confuse with each other. Level 6-6 focuses on the -sion and -tion endings. The ten words used in this level are fraction, action, reaction, nation, conclusion, equation, direction, section, mission, and tension.

Level 6-7 focuses on the commonly-confused -cher, -ture, and -sure endings. The ten words used in this level are picture, future, nature, pitcher, pressure, capture, mixture, pleasure, treasure, and adventure.

One great feature of Rocket Spelling is the ability to see all of your students' progress at a glance through the Progress tab in your teacher account. We wanted to make sure you noticed, though, that each cell in that spreadsheet can be clicked for additional information, as seen here:

Last week, the School News Network (an education news site based in Grand Rapids, MI) ran this article about Rocket Spelling. It hints at the heart behind this website: Rocket Spelling is one student's quest to make spelling more fun for the next generation of students than it was for him.

If you enjoy Rocket Spelling, you might also be interested in some of Josh's other creations, all designed to help elementary teachers, such as:

Level 6-5 focuses on high-frequency words that start with either a silent w as part of a 'wr' beginning or a silent k as part of a 'kn' beginning. The ten words used in this level are write, know, known, written, wrong, knife, knit, wrestle, knot, and knock.