Move About It cards can help support science exploration and inquiry. Draw cards from the Move About It deck and allow students to interpret prompts with their bodies. Discuss, iterate, and reflect with students, fostering sense-making both in movement and conceptual language.
Why have students Move About It?
Movement-based inquiry supports youth in reasoning about and representing complex ideas. In our Dance to Explore Science Camp, we got youth moving as a way into inquiry, to help them get a feel for phenomena in their bodies, to explore and model emergent phenomena (like fish schooling and birds flocking), to engage in sense-making around science concepts (like how information travels from the brain to the body through the nervous system), and to generate new questions about how things work. There are many different ways to use the Move About It Cards to support your students in embodied thinking. Here are some sample activities to help you get started
The four types of cards – ways in, ways through, ways together, and ways out – offer simple prompts inspired by everyday actions and your imagination.
Ways In cards help you get moving! From entering a space, starting a session, or introducing movement to a group. Ways In build on familiar actions like walking, breathing, and changing direction to offer approachable ways to get a group in motion. Getting people to move together can be challenging: we often sit still to think and forget we have creative, expressive bodies. We hope Ways In cards will guide you in exploring how to think together using movement in ways that feel doable and spark curiosity.
Ways Through cards build on the foundation of Ways In, expanding movement variety, quality, and complexity. Ways Through cards invite new coordination patterns and vivid imagery. While Ways In help movers trust their instincts, Ways Through stretch those instincts into uncharted territories and open space to feel surprised. Here, dance becomes discovery. We don’t know what is possible until we do it, feel it, and move through it together.
Ways Together cards explicitly focus on moving in relation to others. Sometimes it can feel hard to keep coming up with ideas on your own. Ways Together cards foster movement “conversations,” where choices are shaped by the group. Through movement conversations, individuals can become a connected whole, shifting from feeling like a group of “I’s” to one “We.” In this space, ideas emerge that can only be understood together. These cards help cultivate connection, responsiveness, and community through movement.
Ways Out cards provide intentional transitions that honor how movement changes us. It is valuable to be just as intentional about how we enter movement as to how we exit. Ways Out cards ground participants, restore simplicity, and guide toward an ending. Rather than an abrupt stop, Ways Out cards provide a thoughtful conclusion, respecting the shared experience and preparing integrated, curious bodies for what comes next.
There are endless ways to combine these cards to get groups to think together in classrooms, workshops, laboratories, or community spaces. Get ready to move!
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