Launching Our New Play-Based Toddler Curriculum, Co-Created with Educators

At Neighborhood Villages, we are committed to addressing inequity in the early childhood education field—and we know that begins with focusing on the needs of our youngest learners and their dedicated educators. 

We also know that the first years of a child’s life are the most critical period of rapid brain development, and early childhood programs play a powerful role in supporting infants, toddlers, and preschoolers as they develop physically, emotionally, socially, and cognitively.

But, despite the importance of early education, there is a significant gap when it comes to high-quality, culturally competent, and aligned curricula for toddlers. Until now, providers face few choices for appropriate curricula for this age group and, sadly, this can leave educators on their own to try to design programming.

Some educators — desperate for ideas — even resort to places like Pinterest to find curriculum inspiration. Our early educators and our children deserve better than this. That’s why we were inspired to pilot an innovative, first-of-its-kind curriculum resource explicitly designed for the learning and development of toddlers. 

We are so grateful to have the support of our partners in this project, Boston Public Schools and The LEGO Foundation, as we embarked on our mission to create this resource over 18 months ago. Our process began as it always does when Neighborhood Villages launches a new initiative: partnership with the experts. In this case, that led us directly to those that work with toddlers day-to-day and know the most about their development: their teachers and caregivers. 

After more than a year of developing this critical resource for and with early educators through an inclusive, collaborative, and iterative process, we are so proud of the result. The curriculum is called Learning Through Exploration: A Play-Based Toddler Curriculum, and it is a Reggio-inspired, anti-bias, trauma-informed, social emotional focused, high-quality resource tailored specifically to meet the developmental needs of toddlers. 

We are excited to have developed this curriculum not for educators, but alongside them, with genuine appreciation for the value and expertise that they bring to the table. This high-quality resource includes five developmentally appropriate exploration units, each supported with provocation suggestions, book lists, family engagement letters, and much more. 

We spent more than a year piloting the curriculum in The Neighborhood, a network of five early learning centers in Boston in which we test innovative programs designed to transform our early childhood education system. 

All of this work culminated in our official launch this week, making the curriculum available for free to educators across the state and the nation. Additional curriculum services will be available soon including webinars, coaching and workshops to support the implementation of the curriculum in classrooms.

We are so grateful to all of our partners in this work who helped this project become a reality. Together, we can realize a future in which all children have equitable access to high-quality early education that sets them up to thrive. 

To access the curriculum and accompanying resources, click here.