Learning to read is an important competence to function in modern society. Nevertheless, roughly 15 % of Danish school children have poor reading abilities and it raises concerns (Christensen, 2018). How to enhance children’s reading skills is therefore an important question. Movement in close connection with the learning content, embodied learning, has previously been seen to be an effective tool to improve academic performance within mathematics (Beck et al., 2016) and second language (Mavilidi, Okely, Chandler, Cliff, & Paas, 2015). It is still unknown whether embodied learning is an effective tool to improve literacy skills for children’s first language. Therefore and to this aim, the present thesis investigated if meaningful movements in close connection to the learning content, have positive effects on children’s pre-reading skills, word reading and spelling performance. We performed three school projects to investigate: I) whether embodied learning could enhance children’s letter recognition in an acute setup (10 minutes), II) which forms of movements (hands/arms vs. whole-body) would have the highest effect on children’s letter-sound knowledge and reading performance in a longitudinal study (8-weeks), and lastly III) whether movement would be extra beneficial for children with reading difficulties (4-weeks project). All three studies were performed with a strong focus on physical play. Manuscript I investigated whether two movement interventions of 10 minutes could enhance children’s letter recognition. Results shows that fine motor movements (FME) had a higher effect on children’s letter recognition compared to a non-motor movement group (CON) and gross-motor movement group (GME). This sug- gests that movement can be used to enhance children’s literacy performance. Manuscript II investigated which motor modality would have the highest impact on children’s letter-sound knowledge and reading performance. Children performing whole-body movements (WM) improved their letter-sound knowledge significantly compared to children using only their arms/hands (HM) as well as compared to a no-movement group (CON) after 8 weeks using embodied learning activities. In addition, HM had a higher long-term improvement in conditional letter-sounds compared to CON and WM. The results show that embodied learning is beneficial for children’s pre-reading skills, and that both whole-body movements and hand-motor movements can enhance children’s literacy performance. However and in contrast, no improvement was observed for reading performance. Manuscript III investigated whether the effect of embodied learning is determined by different levels in word reading performance at baseline in children. The results suggest that embodied learning improved spelling performance and letter-sound knowledge for both children with high reading ability at baseline and children with reading difficulties. The present results of the thesis provide us with a basic understand of how embodied learning may have a positive effect on children’s literacy performance. Furthermore, it also provides evidence and understanding of which forms of movement are beneficial for improving pre-reading skills and spelling performance. However as evident from the present results, the motor modality used in connection with learning is probably not as important as the integration of the movement to the learning task (task integration). Hopefully, the thesis can contribute to increasing attention on the importance of learning activities with high task integration of movements in school.