I came home with my brain buzzing, my notes overflowing, and a renewed conviction in everything we believe at Twisty Kids — that for educators and therapists, the materials on the table aren't an accessory. They're the curriculum.
This recap is written for early childhood educators, primary classroom teachers, pediatric occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, early intervention specialists, and centre directors. Below: the most actionable takeaways from the keynotes, what they mean for your room or caseload, and how reusable, open-ended materials fit into a research-aligned practice.
What Is Learn Play Thrive's Pedagogy in Practice Conference?
Learn Play Thrive's Pedagogy in Practice is one of the most respected early education conferences in the region — a research-grounded, classroom-relevant gathering for educators, leaders, and pedagogical thinkers. Unlike conferences that stay in theory and leave practitioners to translate, Pedagogy in Practice is built around a beautifully simple promise: take what the research says, and turn it into something a tired, brilliant educator (or therapist) can use first thing Monday morning.
This year's program covered seven interlocking themes — leadership as pedagogy, multimodal learning, STEAM and gender equity, visual arts as inquiry, music in early childhood development, culturally inclusive teaching, and psychological safety in learning environments. Different sessions, one quiet thread running through them all: children learn best when they are trusted, materials matter, and the adult shows up with intention.
1. Multimodal Learning: A Frame That Maps Cleanly Onto EYLF v2 (and IEP/IFSP Goals)
One standout session reframed how we think about learning altogether. The speaker pushed back hard on the old notion of "learning styles" — the idea that some children are "visual" or "kinesthetic" or "auditory" learners, locked into a single mode.
The truth, backed by current research and Australia's updated Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF v2), is much more interesting. Children learn multimodally — through movement, gesture, drawing, building, sound, storytelling, talk, and digital tools, often all at the same time. There is no separation of body and mind. A child's hands are part of their thinking.
For practitioners, this is more than a philosophy — it's a planning frame:
- For ECE educators: Multimodal play is now an explicit expectation under EYLF v2, not an optional extra. Plan provocations that invite at least three modes (touch, talk, build) at once.
- For OTs: Multimodal materials let you target fine-motor, bilateral coordination, in-hand manipulation, and graphomotor pre-writing skills inside a single activity that the child experiences as play.
- For SLPs and early intervention specialists: Children "act" their way into language. A material that invites narrative, sequencing, and joint attention gives you a richer language sample than a flashcard ever will.
Reusable wax sticks (like Twisty Kids) are intentionally designed for this. A child who pinches, twists, presses, and shapes a stick into a letter, a sun, then a snake, isn't "playing instead of learning." They're working on bilateral coordination, in-hand translation, semantic categorisation, and narrative sequencing — all at once.
2. Materials Are Partners in Learning — Not Worksheets
Every speaker at the conference, in their own words, said a version of the same thing: materials are not just supplies. They are partners.
A "material-rich environment" was described as a "space of collective inquiry" — a place where children and educators dwell, linger, and think together. Different materials offer different potentials. Wire bends. Clay holds memory. Paint flows. Wax sticks adhere, twist, peel, reshape, and don't dry out between sessions.
A few principles came up again and again — and they translate directly into procurement decisions:
- Less is more. Reduce visual clutter so children can attend deeply. This matters even more for children with sensory regulation or attention differences.
- Curation over abundance. Thoughtfully chosen, beautiful materials beat a bin of random plastic every time. One excellent open-ended tool does more pedagogical work than ten single-use kits.
- Reusability matters. Materials children can revisit, reshape, and extend over weeks support deeper learning — and they protect your annual consumables budget.
This principle — choose fewer, better, more open-ended materials — is exactly the philosophy behind every Twisty Kids classroom set. Reusable wax sticks are intentionally simple so children can return to them across a term, in different provocations, with different learning intentions each time.
3. STEAM Education and the Gender Equity Problem We All Have to Solve
This session quietly broke my heart and lit a fire under me at the same time.
The numbers from Australia: women make up about 50.7% of the workforce, but only 27% of the STEM workforce and just 14% of engineers. Despite billions invested in "women in STEM" programs, female participation has grown by only about 2% in the past decade. The most chilling statistic of all: many girls have already opted out of STEM by around age 8, having quietly decided they are "not a STEM kind of girl."
A few ideas to take back to your team meeting:
- STEAM means integration. A single science experiment is not STEAM. STEAM requires integrating at least two of the five pillars — Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics — into projects that run for weeks, even terms.
- Keep the A. Arts are the access point through which most early childhood educators (and most young children, especially girls) enter STEM thinking.
- About 56% of children's everyday play is already STEAM-related. The educator's job is to recognise it, celebrate it, and build on it with thoughtful questions and new materials.
- Productive failure builds resilience. Model failure yourself. Celebrate the attempt and the revision, not only the correct answer.
When a child rolls a wax stick into a wheel, fails to balance it, tries a flatter shape, builds an axle, and finally invents a working cart — that is engineering. That is STEAM. That is exactly the kind of play we should be documenting and extending.
4. The Power of Music in Early Childhood Development (and Therapy Sessions)
I went into this session expecting "music is nice for kids." I left convinced that music is a developmental necessity, not a nice-to-have — and it's a tool every educator and therapist should be using intentionally.
The speaker — drawing on Zoltán Kodály and Christopher Small's idea of "musicking" — made the case that music activates more regions of the brain at once than almost any other "language" children use. Because the auditory system reaches the brainstem before higher thinking areas of the brain, music can regulate a child's nervous system before language and logic kick in. OTs and early intervention therapists, this matters for every child you work with on regulation and arousal.
- About 10 minutes of structured music a day is enough to support emotional regulation, neural connectivity between hemispheres, and the calm-alert "green zone" you want kids in for learning.
- The three pillars of a good music moment are simple: beat, singing, and movement.
- Stop worrying about whether you're "musical." Vagus nerve activation through humming, singing, and rhythmic breathing is universally accessible.
The "spaghetti bolognese" analogy from this session has stuck with me: children come for the taste (the fun) and you sneak in the developmental "vegetables" (coordination, midline crossing, proprioception, nervous-system regulation) underneath. The same principle applies to creative materials work — children show up for the joy of building a wax-stick rocket, and the in-hand manipulation, sequencing, and bilateral integration come along for the ride.
5. Visual Arts as the Glue of the Curriculum (and an Inquiry Tool for Therapy)
The visual arts session reframed art as a language of thinking — not "craft time," not a calendar-driven holiday cut-and-paste, but a serious mode of inquiry, drawing on Dewey, Reggio Emilia, and Clark and Moss's mosaic approach.
- Tokenistic crafts (twenty identical Mother's Day handprints) communicate to families that the adult was in control and the child's ideas weren't central.
- Inquiry-based projects start from children's questions, observed play, and open-ended provocations.
- The educator's role is to be present at the art table — modeling language, extending ideas, offering provocations like "What do you think happened?" — not to set out materials and disappear.
- Process and product both matter. The product "bears witness" to the child's thinking and competence and gives families a clear window into the quality of your pedagogy.
A theme that connected this session to everything else: the educator is an artographer — artist, researcher, and teacher all at once. The same is true of every therapist who curates materials with intention to elicit a specific motor pattern, language sample, or regulation response.
6. Joint Attention, Documentation, and Why Screens Aren't the Enemy
I was bracing for an anti-screen lecture. What I got was much more nuanced — and much more useful for clinical and classroom practice.
Screens, the speakers agreed, are neutral tools. The problem isn't the screen; it's passive consumption. The real magic happens when children use any tool (digital or physical) to create, communicate, and collaborate.
The deeper idea was joint attention — the moment when a child and adult focus on the same thing together. Joint attention is where sustained shared thinking happens, and sustained shared thinking is one of the strongest predictors of later school success — a fact every SLP, OT, and ECE educator should keep in their pocket.
Documentation matters too — not the polished, performative kind, but the working kind: rough notes, photos, drawings pinned to a wall — used to make children's thinking visible. For therapists, this is also your evidence: progress over time, captured in the child's own modes.
7. Complicate the Play (In a Good Way)
Adding a gentle constraint, a new question, or one new material doesn't break play — it deepens it. "Can you make it taller?" "What if you only used three colors?" "Can you build the letter your name starts with?"
For educators and therapists, this is the difference between a child who is "occupied" and a child who is learning. Complicating play is how you turn an open-ended activity into a precise opportunity to scaffold a specific goal — pre-writing, midline crossing, expressive language, executive function, social negotiation.
How Twisty Kids Fits Into a Professional Practice
Walking through the conference exhibitor space and listening to those sessions, I kept thinking about why we built Twisty Kids in the first place. Every keynote validated the design choices that go into our reusable wax sticks and educator play sets:
- Open-ended: No "right" answer, no single-use template. Children invent. Therapists scaffold.
- Multimodal: Engages tactile, proprioceptive, visual, and language systems at once — making one material work across an OT, SLP, or ECE goal area.
- Reusable: Iteration is built in. The wax doesn't dry out. Children try, fail, reshape, try again, session after session — protecting your consumables budget.
- Mess-free and clinic-friendly: No glue, no glitter, no setup, no cleanup. Wipe-down friendly between clients.
- Screen-free: A calm, focused alternative for waiting rooms, transition times, and quiet circle work.
- Curriculum and framework aligned: Designed to slot into EYLF v2, NQF, and NAEYC DAP-aligned pedagogy.
Concrete Ways Educators and Therapists Use Twisty Kids
- ECE classrooms (3–5 yrs): Mark-making and pre-literacy provocations, STEAM building challenges, child-led inquiry projects, calm-down-corner manipulation, name-writing.
- Primary classrooms (5–8 yrs): Maths manipulatives (number lines, fractions, geometry nets), spelling and phonics work, story sequencing, science modeling.
- Pediatric OT: Pinch and pincer-grip strengthening, in-hand manipulation, bilateral coordination, midline crossing, graphomotor and pre-writing readiness, sensory regulation.
- Pediatric SLP: Eliciting expressive language, narrative scaffolding, sequencing, articulation drills disguised as making, AAC user engagement, joint attention building.
- Early intervention: Cause-and-effect exploration, fine-motor goals embedded in play, sensory exploration for children with regulation differences.
- Inclusive and neurodiverse classrooms: Predictable, low-arousal material that works for children who find traditional craft overwhelming.
If you're setting up a STEAM provocation, an OT goal block, an SLP narrative session, or a centre-wide inquiry project, our Twisty Mega Box, Twisty Play Sets, and Twisty Minis are designed to be the kind of curated, reusable, open-ended material the conference kept asking us to put in front of children.
A Practical Checklist: Bringing the Conference Into Your Room or Clinic on Monday
- Curate, don't dump. Choose three to five beautiful, open-ended materials per provocation. Take everything else away.
- Sit at the table. Be present. Ask one question, then wait.
- Document the process, not just the product. Photograph it. Pin it up. Let children revisit and re-theorize.
- Add one constraint. "Can you build it without your dominant hand?" (OT goal). "Tell me a story about it." (SLP goal). "Can you fit it in this little box?" (executive function).
- Celebrate the failed attempts. "I love how you tried that and it didn't work. What will you try next?"
- Ten minutes of music a day. Beat, sing, move. Use it as a transition ritual.
- Audit your materials shelf. Replace one consumable kit per term with a reusable, open-ended tool.
Frequently Asked Questions for Educators and Therapists
What is the Pedagogy in Practice Early Education Conference?
Pedagogy in Practice is Learn Play Thrive's annual early childhood education conference for educators, leaders, and pedagogical specialists. The 2026 program covered multimodal learning, STEAM and gender equity, visual arts as inquiry, music in early childhood, culturally inclusive practice, leadership as pedagogy, and psychological safety in learning environments.
Are Twisty Kids reusable wax sticks suitable for early learning classrooms and therapy clinics?
Yes. Twisty Kids products are designed with early childhood educators, primary teachers, and pediatric therapists in mind — non-toxic, reusable, mess-free, wipe-down friendly between clients, and aligned with EYLF v2, NQF, and DAP-aligned pedagogy. They reuse session after session, which protects your consumables budget.
How do open-ended materials like Twisty Kids support OT and SLP goals?
Open-ended wax sticks support OT goals including pinch and pincer-grip strengthening, in-hand manipulation, bilateral coordination, midline crossing, and graphomotor readiness. For SLPs, they elicit expressive language, narrative sequencing, and joint attention, and they make excellent low-pressure scaffolds for articulation and AAC modeling.
How do Twisty Kids align with STEAM pedagogy and EYLF v2?
Twisty Kids invite at least two STEAM pillars at once — for example, science (testing balance and structure), engineering (building and iterating), arts (color and form), and math (counting, ratio, symmetry). They support iterative, multimodal, inquiry-based learning — exactly the kind of practice EYLF v2's multimodal play expectation calls for.
Do you offer bulk or educator pricing for centres, schools, and clinics?
Yes. Twisty Kids offers educator and bulk pricing for early learning centres, primary schools, OT and SLP clinics, and early intervention services. Contact our educator team for a quote and a free creative-play guide tailored to your setting.
Why does screen-free, hands-on play matter so much for young children?
Hands-on play activates multimodal thinking, regulates the nervous system, builds fine and gross motor skills, and supports sustained shared thinking — one of the strongest predictors of later academic success. For children with sensory regulation, attention, or language differences, low-arousal, predictable, reusable materials are particularly powerful.
A Final Thought
The closing message of the conference was, in spirit, the same as the message we try to live at Twisty Kids: trust children, choose materials with intention, and don't be afraid to sit down at the table and play with them.
If this recap was useful, the best thing you can do next is put a curated, open-ended, reusable creative tool in front of a child this week — and ask them one good question.
Whether you're an early childhood educator setting up a STEAM provocation, a pediatric therapist building a fine-motor goal block, or a centre director curating materials for the year ahead, we'd love to be part of your practice.