ABSTRACT
This approach is designed to encourage the children to physically enact their ideas and represent understandings using their bodies. They should be encouraged to change their shape, sounds and movements to (re)create as accurate a reproduction of a concept, such as the structure of a tree, an electrical circuit or the floating and sinking of different objects in water, as possible. Reflective discussion and/or further suggestions about ‘what else’ may be missing or forgotten can inform a revised enactment. Children asked to model an electrical circuit may, for example, stand in a circle, hands by their sides, as one child runs around the outside of the circle representing ‘a moving electron’. There are a number of flaws with this model, so reflective discussion would be important to help the children to realise that electrons cannot travel through a circuit without ‘connections’, and there needs to be a power source and a switch (determining the direction of movement of the electricity). It is also important that the children appreciate that electricity will not flow through an incomplete circuit. So a circle of upright bodies with an orbiting runner is a physical model that can be reflectively improved to become a more accurate depiction of a circuit.
