A shape gets named, and then repeated for years.

Naming arrives after the mark, not before it, and then a personal alphabet settles in.

At some point a child makes a closed shape and looks at it and calls it something. Often the naming happens afterwards rather than in advance: the shape is made, and then it is recognised, in the way that a shape in a cloud is recognised. This is a significant shift, because a mark has just become a symbol. Soon the child starts announcing the subject before beginning, and the announcement and the result may not match, which does not matter at all. The important development is that marks can now stand for things, and that idea is doing a great deal of work.

What follows is a long stretch in which the child assembles a personal set of symbols and uses them repeatedly. A house with a triangle roof, a window in each quarter and a chimney with smoke, whether or not any house they have seen has a chimney. A person built from a circle with legs, gaining a body, arms, hands with careful fingers, hair. A strip of blue along the top for sky and a strip of green along the bottom for ground, with a gap of paper in between. These are not observations of the world. They are a working vocabulary, and the child refines and repeats it because repetition is how a vocabulary becomes fluent.

Adults find this stage frustrating because it looks like a rut and because the symbols are so plainly not accurate. The temptation is to point out that the sky comes down to the ground, or that the arms are joined to the head. Do not. The child is not describing the appearance of things, they are using a notation that works for them, and it will change on its own when they have a reason to change it. Corrections at this point interrupt fluency and teach the child to doubt a system they built themselves, which is a considerable loss for the sake of a chimney.