Although students' difficulties in developing and understanding proofs in mathematics is well documented, less is known about how students' example use may support their proof practices, particularly at the middle school level. Research on example use suggests that strategic thinking with examples could play an important role in exploring conjectures and developing appropriate justifications. This paper introduces a framework of middle-school students' example exploration, distinguishing between the types of examples students use and the uses examples play in making sense of and proving conjectures. Drawing from clinical interviews with 20 students, we present thirteen categories of example types and seven categories of uses, followed by a discussion of each set of categories and their connections to one another. [For the complete proceedings, see ED584829.]