Reading Rockets is a topic-based reader intended for elementary school students. It is designed to improve English reading ability, build vocabulary, stimulate discussion, and enhance critical thinking and writing skills. The reading, passages in Reading Rockets center on a variety of contemporary, high-interest topics, and the English used in all the passages is vivid and realistic. Alongside each passage is a mini-dictionary containing brief definitions of key word. This enables students to read the passages with more ease. Each lesson in Reading Rockets includes the following features:

Pre-reading warm-up questions: These questions stimulate interest in the reading's topic, and they also allow the instructor to get an idea of students' background knowledge of the topic

Topic-based passage: The passages' clear organization and engaging, up-to-date content encourage students to read activity. Through reading the passages, students can also develop critical thinking skills such as making inferences and making conclusions.

Comprehension questions: Students can check their basic understanding of the passage by answering the true-false "gist" questions. These are followed by more detailed comprehension questions, which check students' understanding of factual information as well as implied information.

Vocabulary build-up : In this section, students can review the words and phrases they learned from the reading, Each Vocabulary build-up also includes an easy, interesting activity that exposes students to such structural features of English words as word origins, word roots, and prefixes and suffixes.

Follow-up activities: These activities are designed to build critical reading, listening writing, and communicative skills. Open-ended questions allow students to develop such critical reading skills as finding the main idea and determining cause and effect. Listening activities are based on the passage and are intended to reinforce students' understanding of the reading. Communicative questions allow students to express themelves more freely as they explore how the readings' issues are related to their lives. After the communicative section, there is a brief summarizing activity in which in which students can check their basic grasp of the passage.

Reading Rockets also includes a Teacher's Gide with answers and easy, step-by-step instructions on how to effectively use the Student's Book