Students come to class with ideas about science content and the practices used to generate knowledge. Their lived experience provides them with basic ideas about how the world works. Tapping into their innate understandings and testing their ideas allows them to construct a more accurate understanding. Research shows that all students are ready to learn at high levels if instruction is sequenced in ways that: (1) prior experiences are related to new ideas; (2) new ideas are entrenched in firsthand experiences with data; (3) data and evidence allow students to form accurate scientific claims; and (4) teachers connect more sophisticated knowledge with student constructed knowledge (Brown 2018). These four ideas are what explore-before-explain teaching is all about. The article presents an illustrative example of how an assessment probe can be used to initiate explore-before-explain lessons and ground learning in a scientific phenomenon. While the approach is consistent with other ways the activities have been used at the middle level, it is unique for elementary students (see Brown and Concannon 2018; Brown 2011). Presented is a 50-minute, fifth-grade explore-before-explain lesson on properties of matter that includes an assessment probe, data-producing experiences, and authoritative explanations to engage students in learning the transfer of energy.