Since not very many high-frequency words in the English language follow a long 'e' + consonant + silent -e pattern, we have included three other common spelling patterns for making the long 'e' sound in these three levels.

Level 4-7 focuses on words where an 'ee' combo makes a long 'e' sound, while level 4-8 focuses on words where an 'ea' combo makes a long 'e' sound. Level 4-9 demonstrates an interesting spelling pattern for your students to learn: that a -y ending that is preceded by a consonant often makes a long 'e' sound in multi-syllabic words (happy, funny, study, etc.).

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.

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.

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

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?

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.