What distinguishes students' sense-making of the past from historians' thinking is that historians know how to determine the validity of competing truth claims, a rather complex intellectual skill that requires a sophisticated set of heuristics and strategies. One way to help students learn how to determine the validity of competing truth claims is to have them work with websites that offer differing claims, conjectures, and perspectives. The article gives an example that highlights what happened when two students were confronted with the challenge of considering competing claims. While they were able to move from beginning to intermediate understandings of claims, and they could identify claims and counterclaims, they did not examine the supporting evidence for these claims; nor did they understand the need to rigorously evaluate competing claims. The article presents a set of questions to engage students in important conversations about claims and counterclaims to make them think about the validity of claims based on good evidence and sound reasoning. The questions also encourages students to consider how authors try to influence them as readers. The article also presents criteria for understanding where students might be on a continuum in their understanding of claims, ranging from beginning, intermediate, and advanced understanding. The guiding questions offered in this article, along with a claims continuum, can play a part in guiding teachers' and students' work with claims and counterclaims. The questions and continuum can guide teachers in developing classroom criteria for identifying and evaluating claims and evidence, provide models of historical writing in which historians address competing claims, and model the kinds of thinking and discourse necessary to contend with multiple and competing claims and evidence. (Contains 7 endnotes.)