Move Me a Story: Augmenting Story Genres with Creative Movement

Abstract

Stories, movement, and play contribute to children’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being. In this chapter, two artists-in-residence describe how educators and families can use stories to promote children’s innate physicality through creative movement. Building on Laban Movement Analysis, the Move BEST framework provides a structure for building children’s movement capacities. This framework includes five dimensions of movement that are accessible for non-dance teachers and young children including locomotor and non-locomotor movement, body, efforts, space and time. Educators follow an instructional sequence of imitation, exploration, and creation as they use elements from this framework with various story genres. These genres include the literary genres of poetry, fairytales, folktales, and fables; musical genres of cumulative songs and orchestral music; and visual genres of pictograms and tableaux. Throughout these movement and play-based activities, young learners employ a repertoire of increasingly complex movement elements, and their movement sequences become more abstract, nonliteral, and varied. Creative movement and stories are complementary processes in helping children grow as artists, creative problem solvers, community members, and kinesthetic beings.