It is fascinating to listen to middle school students talk about food for plants and animals and how that food is used. Some students describe ideas that are essentially correct. Some comments suggest that students are familiar with the content, but their understanding is incomplete or includes inaccuracies. Finally, some students have little understanding of the content; however, they use their own experiences to reason logically and generate their own ideas about the content. Beyond just listening, uncovering students' initial ideas and attending to how those ideas change over a unit of instruction are important steps to ensuring that students learn scientifically correct ideas. In this article, the authors describe strategies for eliciting student thinking, common responses to elicitation prompts, and implications for moving students' thinking forward. (Contains 6 figures.)