Cox Campus Practice Exam

Stage 2 Left-to-Right Scribbling focuses on how children begin to treat writing as something that moves across the page and uses symbols, even if those symbols aren’t real words yet. At this stage, kids start at the left edge and travel toward the right, showing they understand writing has a direction. They also begin using invented letters—symbol-like shapes that look like letters but don’t spell actual words—indicating early phonemic awareness and the idea that letters map to sounds. This combination marks a move from just drawing to purposeful writing with direction and symbolic meaning, laying the groundwork for later conventional spelling. Writing that goes right-to-left or drawing-only behavior would not reflect this emerging understanding of direction and symbol use, and conventional spelling comes in well after this stage.