A full-year, 6th-grade ELA curriculum designed for Special Education and ESL students who find reading, writing, and spelling overwhelming.
If you teach 6th-grade resource, self-contained, or co-taught ESL, you know the daily struggle:
The "Baby Stuff" Problem: You try remedial phonics programs, but your 12-year-old students check out because the materials look like they were made for kindergartners.
The "Overwhelm" Problem: You try grade-level standard curriculum, but the vocabulary density crushes your students before they even understand the concept.
You are stuck in the middle, spending your nights cobbling together resources that weren't designed for your specific students. It’s time for a map built for this exact terrain.
A research-backed framework designed for the adolescent struggling reader.
M.A.P.S. isn't just another reading program. It’s an integrated system that fuses the gold standard of intervention with the reality of 6th-grade standards.
We use an Orton-Gillingham based approach adapted for the middle school brain, focusing on three key pillars:
Sixty percent of English words come from Latin or Greek roots. For our Spanish-speaking ELLs, this is a superpower waiting to be unlocked.
What others do: Teach isolated vocabulary lists.
What M.A.P.S. does: We explicitly teach morphological roots and connect English academic terms to their Spanish cognates (e.g., argument/argumento, contradict/contradecir), instantly accelerating comprehension.
We tackle decoding gaps head-on with explicit, multi-sensory vowel team and segmenting drills—but we do it using age-appropriate vocabulary, not primary-level words.
We never dumb down the standard; we ramp up the support. We break complex tasks like argumentative writing into micro-steps that guarantee success.
M.A.P.S. is designed for the reality of a tight schedule. Every day follows a predictable, systematic rhythm that reduces anxiety and maximizes learning time.
Minutes 0-10: The Warm-up (Foundations)
Activity: Multi-sensory Vowel Team drill & Sound Segmenting.
Goal: Sharpening decoding tools.
Minutes 10-25: The Lesson (Morphology & Analysis)
Activity: Direct instruction on a new concept using root analysis and cognate connections.
Goal: Building deep word knowledge.
Minutes 25-45: The Application (Synthesis)
Activity: Scaffolded writing practice (e.g., drafting a claim using sentence frames) or structured independent practice.
Goal: Connecting foundations to 6th-grade output.
Don't believe that students with decoding struggles can write complex arguments? Watch how we scaffold it.
We are soft-launching M.A.P.S. by releasing our powerful Argumentative Essay Writing Lesson. This isn't just about "finding evidence." It's about giving students the morphological tools to express sophisticated opinions.
Inside this preview unit:
✅ Debatable Topic Analysis: Moving beyond "fact vs. opinion."
✅ The Claim Blueprint: A deeply scaffolded graphic organizer for Hook, Background, and Claim.
✅ Exemplar Deconstruction: Analyzing "what good looks like."
✅ Claim Task Cards: Low-stakes, high-engagement practice.
[Button: Get the Argumentative Writing Preview Unit for $X]
I’m Canissa. For 13 years, I’ve worked in Special Education and ESL classrooms, constantly searching for the bridge between learning to read and reading to learn. With a Master’s in Special Education and current doctoral research, I built M.A.P.S. because the curriculum my students needed simply didn't exist.
I built this for them. And I built it for you.
Still have questions about IEP alignment or OG integration? Contact me