Students will launch the investigation by testing decoding strategies on real-world mystery texts, then organize early evidence and questions in a Word-Pattern Investigation Notebook so they are ready to design stronger inquiry methods in the next phase.

Students will investigate unfamiliar words in real-world texts, build a shared bank of academic and domain-specific terms, and refine a focused question and hypothesis about which decoding strategies work best in different contexts. They will gather early evidence from text samples, justify word-meaning decisions with textual and pattern-based evidence, and revise their thinking through peer critique before moving into formal method design.

Students will finalize a credible investigation method for decoding unfamiliar words in real-world texts, define what counts as evidence, and build traceable tools for collecting examples, justifying claims, and noting uncertainty before moving into full analysis.

Students will analyze the word evidence they collected, test their hypotheses against patterns and anomalies, refine claims through critique, and prepare a concise public-facing report of what decoding strategies work, when they fail, and what evidence supports those conclusions.

Students will present their Decode the Real World Toolkit and Word-Pattern Investigation Notebook to an authentic audience, defend their decoding claims with text and pattern evidence, respond to audience questions about uncertainty and limits, and complete a final evidence-based reflection on how they use word patterns to understand unfamiliar everyday texts.