Current educational policy in Denmark encourages teachers of all subjects to infuse movement activities into their teaching in an effort to promote children’s wellbeing and improve educational achievement. It is assumed that physical activity will contribute to children’s health and increase their motivation for learning in all subjects. This is based on two concurrent developments: On the one hand, health is of great political interest to educational policy makers because of increasing obesity in the general population, including children and young people and how this impacts on society. On the other hand, there is research that proposes that increasing physical activity will result in improved academic performance. Troubled by such claims we examined what it means when physical activity and movement is implemented in science, a subject that is still dominated by the view that learning happens primarily in the head. Our research aimed to explore how young people feel about ‘being physical’ in science. To examine such a question, we positioned our work in the ideas put forward by the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He argued for the intertwined relationship between the body and mind and we use these ideas to discuss what this may mean for an embodied pedagogy in science. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘the lived body’ considers how the body is placed in the world, and situates experiences and the responses to them accordingly. Our examination of a teaching sequence in a Danish primary science classroom (14-16 year old students) showed how students’ situated themselves (their bodies) during their activities. We analysed the video recorded student performances together with the students and established how the perceptions of their own bodily performances shaped how they felt about engaging in a learning task in science that involved physical activity. We propose that adopting a pedagogy of embodiment for science teaching will require delicate approaches that consider how students perceive the world, themselves in it and the sense-making processes afforded to them.