Meet the Word Mapping Project, the new cult favorite vocabulary supplement

A teacher-authored program from Sean Morrisey has a lot to offer for teachers—and curriculum developers

Interest in the Word Mapping Project has been taking the literacy community (and our network) by storm.

Sean Morrisey, a fifth grade teacher with outstanding reading outcomes, designed the Word Mapping Project to increase the dosage of vocabulary instruction for his students, and his design is grounded in morphology, so it nurtures students’ vocabulary, spelling, phonemic awareness, and fluency skills, all in the same instructional block. It offers a good reminder of the interconnectedness of these skills.

Honestly, Sean’s design is hitting on so many skills at once that it’s hard to characterize the Word Mapping Project. Is it a vocabulary supplement, a morphology resource, or the perfect bridge from foundational skills into propelling language skills and therefore comprehension? Elana Gordon’s description hints at the multilayered design: she describes it as “a curriculum built to teach words through their sounds, spellings, and meanings. It integrates academic vocabulary, spelling patterns, morphology, and fluency into one cohesive system.”

Also, we LOVE Elana’s gains since using the Word Mapping Project, mirroring Sean’s own performance.

The Word Mapping Project offers a valuable supplement to basically any curriculum, which frankly highlights a real void in the curriculum landscape. More on that below, following this guest post from Sean.

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Introducing The Word Mapping Project

“Linking Sound, Spelling, and Meaning for Word Mastery”

A little over ten years ago, state assessment data revealed something surprising about my 5th graders’ reading scores. Many of them missed a so-called “main idea” question—not because they had trouble identifying the main idea, but because they didn’t understand a key word in the question itself: benefit.

That experience made it clear that vocabulary—especially academic vocabulary—can make or break comprehension on state tests. It wasn’t a main-idea failure; it was a vocabulary gap. That moment became the start of my personal, hyper-focused journey into deep and intentional vocabulary instruction.

Over the past decade, my teaching of vocabulary evolved into an approach rooted in the way language actually works. I began with explicit teaching of academic vocabulary and soon recognized that real success came when students understood not just what a word meant, but how it was built. This naturally led into morphology—teaching prefixes, roots, and suffixes as building blocks of meaning—and, more recently, into spelling through a sound- and meaning-based lens.

What started as vocabulary instruction ultimately developed into a connected system where spelling, morphology, and vocabulary work together to build long lasting word knowledge.

This shift has had a profound impact on my students’ performance. This past year, 90% of my 5th graders scored proficient on both the New York State ELA and science assessments—results among the highest in the entire state¹.

But the impact goes far beyond test scores. When students develop deep word knowledge, their overall reading confidence grows, their writing becomes more sophisticated, and they are better equipped to access grade-level content independently. Strong vocabulary is not enrichment—it is the foundation that lifts comprehension, reading fluency, and written expression.

This work ultimately pushed me to develop my own curriculum for grades 3–5—one that treats spelling, vocabulary, and morphology as intentionally interconnected instead of fragmented skills taught in isolation. There is a wide gap in instructional materials for this grade band, especially for students who are beyond basic phonics but still need structured, explicit language teaching. My goal is to fill that void with something rigorous, meaningful, and academically elevating. Thus, The Word Mapping Project was born.

The Word Mapping Project is designed to strengthen literacy by explicitly connecting how words sound, how they are spelled, and what they mean. The curriculum integrates decoding (reading words), encoding (spelling words), and vocabulary development into one cohesive system. Students learn to analyze how prefixes, roots, and suffixes build meaning, how spelling patterns connect to sound, and how that knowledge drives comprehension.

Here’s a sample of the approach. The Word Mapping Project designs lessons around word groups that all share the same phonological pattern—they end with the /shun/ pattern, spelled either -sion or -tion. Each “primary word” is paired with its antonym to strengthen conceptual understanding, and the additional morphology columns show how the same Latin roots (such as pass meaning “suffer or endure,” greg meaning “gather,” and nate meaning “born”) appear in related word families. It is to no surprise that Buffalo Bills fans are called a passionate fanbase. Yes, we have suffered and endured, longing for a superbowl for an eternity. Teaching morphology helps students see that words are not random; they are part of structured meaning networks. By learning them together—sound + spelling + meaning—students deepen vocabulary knowledge while also building spelling and word-analysis skills.

For teachers, the curriculum includes ready-to-use, classroom-friendly materials designed for a 35-minute daily lesson that fits seamlessly into a literacy block. Each unit includes explicit vocabulary scripts, spelling dictation, morphology matrices, fluency passages with embedded vocabulary, student retrieval booklets, reader’s theater scripts, and unit spelling and vocabulary assessments—everything needed for consistent implementation.

This year, my students have become especially fond of the quick writes in The Word Mapping Project. They study an image and challenge themselves to use as much rich vocabulary as possible while crafting a short story. The example below shows just how much a 5th grader can learn and apply sophisticated words such as gracious, passive, officious, productive, defecating, discerned, irascible, commenced, suspicious, and innocuous.

At one point, this student was looking for a word to describe her grandmother’s love of dogs. After a bit of research, she discovered cynophile (cyno → dog; phile → love). I’d say she’s becoming quite the logophile herself!

I use the Word Mapping Project daily with my own fifth-grade students, which means every component is being tested, refined, and adjusted in a real classroom.

Students aren’t just learning sophisticated words. They are using them throughout the school day. Recently, during recess, one of my 5th graders yelled, “Mr. Morrisey, I was just assailed by a constant barrage of snowballs,” demonstrating just how naturally academic language becomes part of their thinking. I chimed back, “please tell the boys to keep the constant barrage of snowballs away from the teachers.” Vocabulary use carries over into their writing as well during other parts of the school day. I gave students the prompt to write a sentence that included a prepositional phrase while embedding any previously learned vocabulary. A typical response is shown below.

Ultimately, The Word Mapping Project is designed to create confident, independent readers and writers who can approach unfamiliar words with curiosity and strategy instead of guesswork. By linking sound, spelling, and meaning in every lesson, students develop a mental “map” of language that supports lifelong literacy success.

Today, nearly 100 teachers across the United States and Canada are piloting the Word Mapping Project. Preliminary outcome data are showing remarkable gains across multiple areas, including reading comprehension, vocabulary, spelling, and reading fluency.

For example, Samantha Lippert, a third-grade teacher piloting the Word Mapping Project, reported that her students’ median reading growth score on i-Ready from fall to winter was 156%—more than three times typical growth. Teachers across pilot classrooms are also reporting oral reading fluency gains at more than twice the expected rate.

In my own classroom, I recently analyzed my students’ spelling growth using a norm-referenced standardized assessment, the Test of Written Spelling – Fifth Edition. The resulting effect size was 1.4, indicating spelling growth approaching 4 times typical annual expectations and this improvement occurred over a 4-month period, not even over an entire year.

These early results suggest that consistently linking sound, spelling, and meaning within every lesson may be producing a compounding effect on literacy development. Just as importantly, students remain deeply engaged—far from bored, they genuinely enjoy the challenge of stretching their vocabulary and are motivated to figure out how words work.

Sean Morrisey is a fifth-grade teacher from Western New York whose work has been featured as a model of meaning-based vocabulary instruction by Melissa and Lori Love Literacy and also by Meredith and David Liben in Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension.

To learn more about the Word Mapping Project, you can get in touch with Sean here.

Paging Curriculum Developers

By now, anyone who knows the ELA curriculum landscape will know that Sean has designed something that can’t be found in any of the common curricula in US schools, even the ones we rate highly for their knowledge-building virtues. Knowledge-building curricula do a wonderful job of using content study as a springboard for vocabulary instruction, and they generally lead on vocabulary instruction for this reason.

But they don’t offer the morphology infusion (and more) that Sean brings to the Word Mapping Project, and we hope Sean’s work pushes the field. We wish more curricula incorporated morphology in such a thoughtful fashion.

After all, the only thing that could make the Word Mapping Project better would be introducing the word study soon after students read a text featuring the anchor vocabulary—introducing some interleaving, for good measure. That’s beyond Sean’s ability; only curriculum developers can make this happen.

Kudos to Sean for his leadership in solving this problem with such elegance and offering a model for the field.

Related Reading

Don’t miss Elena Gordon’s piece on her work with the Word Mapping Project.

Speaking of supplements that address voids in the curriculum landscape, don’t miss our latest piece outlining writing supplements used in our districts.

1. A word about Sean’s performance, from our editors: if you look at districts in New York State with meaningfully more privileged student populations, they’re underperforming Sean’s students. We looked at Bronxville and Scarsdale so you don’t have to.

We know that students from more privileged areas come to school with broader vocabularies, boosting their reading comprehension. How exciting that Sean’s work is offering a path to closing that vocabulary-and-performance gap.