Emergent graphical shape thinking (Moore & Thompson, 2015) is a way of reasoning that is critical across numerous STEM fields. However, evidence indicates that the underlying component ideas for emergent thinking are underdeveloped in school mathematics education (e.g., Thompson & Carlson, 2017), and few studies directly report on students' development of this way of thinking. We present the results of a teaching experiment conducted with eighth-grade students to support stable meanings for emergent graphical shape thinking. We focus on the in-the-moment meanings expressed by a pair of students as they engaged in a sequence of tasks that we conjecture could support stable meanings for constructing and interpreting graphs. [For the complete proceedings, see ED630060.]