Left and Right
What Are Left and Right?
Most adults have no trouble telling left from right. Some remember it because that’s the hand they write with, others because that’s the one they wear a watch on. Some just think about reading and writing from left to right.
For kids, though, this idea takes time to develop. First they learn to tell the left and right sides of their own body apart. Then they start to divide the space around them into a left and a right side. As they grow, they discover that left and right aren’t fixed — they depend on where you are. For example, cars traveling in opposite directions both keep to the right side of the road, yet they pass each other safely.
Why Does It Matter for Kids?
Jean Piaget’s classic research showed that children’s understanding of space develops gradually. At first, they see the world only from their own point of view. Over time, they begin to take another person’s perspective. At the projective stage, kids can point to a doll’s right hand when the doll is facing away. Later comes the relational stage, when kids start reasoning about space from someone else’s point of view. According to Piaget, mastering left and right marks an important shift — from physical experience to abstract thinking.
Other studies support this idea. Robert Rigal found that learning to use the words “left” and “right” is a challenge on its own. It’s easier for kids to copy actions like “do what I do” or “turn the same way as the toy car” than to follow instructions such as “raise your right hand” or “turn right.”
Research also shows a strong link between spatial understanding and math development. The direction we read and move our eyes while reading influences the way we learn to count. In cultures where reading goes from left to right, kids tend to count the same way. But in cultures where text runs from right to left, like in Arabic, kids often start their counting on the right and move left.
Even a short session of spatial training can noticeably improve how kids handle column addition or find missing numbers in equations like 4 + __ = 12.
How Do We Teach?
Kids learn to navigate space step by step. First, they pick up words like up and down, and prepositions such as under, over, in front of, behind, and on. As one hand becomes more skillful — the one they use to draw, throw, or eat — they begin to understand left and right. At first they use these words for their own body (left hand, right ear), and later for the world around them (the closet is to the left of the desk, move the box to the right, I’m turning left).
In the early school years, kids start to notice that left and right aren’t the same for everyone. They learn to see things from another person’s point of view. And that skill — imagining how the world looks to someone else — goes far beyond math.
A separate skill to practice is following routes with left and right turns. To do this, kids imagine themselves moving along the path, find their right hand at each turn, and figure out which way to go next.
First Steps
Parts of the Body
Most infants don’t show a clear hand preference, but by the age of five or six, about 90% of kids develop a steady preference for one hand — usually the right. This means they consistently use the same hand for precise actions like writing, holding a spoon, or throwing a ball. Overall, around 90% of the world’s population is right-handed, and this ratio has remained remarkably stable across cultures and history.
In the first activities, kids match their own hand to a picture of a hand and figure out which one in the picture is the right hand.
Left & right
Find the right hands
Then the tasks get a little trickier. The hand might be shown in different positions, palm up or palm down. Sometimes it’s not a hand at all but a glove, and kids have to imagine which hand that glove would fit.
As kids become more aware of their left and right sides, they also learn to scan a page from left to right — the typical reading direction in European cultures. At the same time, they practice finding objects to the left or right of something else.
Left & right
Find the right hands
Left & right
Logic tasks
Left & right
Left and right arrows
Left & right
Left and right arrows
Deep Understanding
Left and Right for Someone Else
Once kids can easily find their own right hand, they can try finding the right hand of a character in a picture. It’s easiest when the character is facing away or seen from above.
Left & right
Find the right hands
It gets trickier when the character faces the viewer. A circle dance can help kids make sense of this. For the dancers turned away, it’s clear which hand is their right one. It’s also easy to see that everyone holding a partner’s right hand is taking it with their own left. Step by step, kids can figure out where each character’s right hand is. They soon notice that a character facing the viewer has their right hand on the opposite side from one who is facing away.
At this point, kids run into a question that doesn’t have a single answer: What’s to the right of this character? They have to clarify — do we mean “to the right” from the character’s point of view or from the viewer’s?
In photos, people are usually listed from left to right from the viewer’s perspective, but for the people in the photo, that order goes from right to left.
Left & right
Relative right and left
Left and right hands
Left and right in handshakes
Left & right
Find the right hands
Left and right
Left and right in the portrait
Confident Mastery
Left and right turns
Once kids understand that left and right depend on the point of view, they can start working with routes that include left and right turns. For example, you can ask how many times the car turned right on its way to the gas station. To answer, the kid has to imagine driving along the road and find their right hand at each turn.
Left & right
Left and right turns
In some tasks, a squirrel moves through a maze, turning in a set pattern, for example, right, then left, then left again. Kids have to figure out where the squirrel will end up.
When looking from above, it becomes clear that right turns follow the direction of a clock’s hands, and left turns go the other way. For example, on a roundabout sign, the arrows move counterclockwise, and the cars on the roundabout always turn left.
If a car keeps turning the same way, its path might form a circle, a spiral, or an even more complex shape.
Left & right
Left and right turns
Simple programs
Simple route programs
Left & right
Left and right turns
Monotone behaviors
Right-turn only roads
Big Ideas
Why do we say that a mirror flips left and right, but not up and down? After all, when we look at a mirrored ceiling, we see ourselves upside down.
Even without seeing a whole person, we can usually tell which hand is right and which is left. If we take three directions — along the thumb of the right hand, along the index finger, and upward from the palm — we can describe what mathematicians call spatial orientation: three axes that define how space is organized.
Kids will meet this idea again later in physics, when they learn about electromagnetism. The direction of a magnetic field and the flow of electric current follow the “right-hand rule.” Spatial orientation also plays an important role in higher geometry, which explores surfaces that cannot be consistently oriented. For example, when you move along a Möbius strip, a pair of vectors can turn into its mirrored version.
Learning to imagine another person’s point of view — for example, creating a route for someone else to follow — is valuable not only for developing algorithmic thinking, but also for building empathy and critical thinking.
