Recent educational legislative acts and public debates in Sweden stress the importance of preschools providing playful and meaningful activities to enhance early experiences in environmental and natural science (e.g., Ministry of Education and Research, 2016). The present study investigates three 5-6 year old children making meaning of the concept of evaporation during an environmental water-theme. Illustrations, in which the participants own bodies were used to explain this concept were selected for further analysis and scrutinized with respect to Vygotsky's (1987) theories of how spontaneous and scientific concepts are linked together. The results tentatively suggest that the teacher's producing and the children's reproducing of embodied illustrations were beneficial for the children's emerging scientific sense making. By sticking to the play-based and theme-oriented preschool tradition the teacher avoided adopting a subject-oriented, school-like way to deal with an environmental phenomenon.