Neighborhood Villages Announces Partnership with LEGO Foundation and Boston Public Schools to Develop a New, Play-Based Early Education Curriculum

BOSTON, MA (December 12, 2022) - Today, Neighborhood Villages announced a new partnership with the LEGO Foundation and Boston Public Schools (BPS) Department of Early Childhood to develop a new leading play-based, vertically aligned curriculum for early childhood education settings.

This innovative curriculum will be designed in continuity with the BPS “Focus on Early Learning” curricula currently for ages 3-8, creating a bridge between early education and BPS programming. The result will be a new groundbreaking and integrated curriculum available to all children between 1-8 years old in Boston.

With grant funds awarded by the LEGO Foundation, Neighborhood Villages will develop the new toddler component of the curriculum (ages 15 months through 2.9 years) and prepare it for effective and seamless scaling across the City of Boston and beyond. It will be play-based, developmentally appropriate, culturally sustaining, trauma-informed and aligned with the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care curriculum rubric and guidelines.

“We are so grateful to the LEGO Foundation for its leadership in making learning through play a priority for every child and for their support of this new initiative,” said Sarah Siegel Muncey, co-founder of Neighborhood Villages, a Boston-based nonprofit that advocates for solutions to the greatest challenges faced by the early education sector. “With our established and ongoing work piloting and testing programs to transform the early education and care delivery system, Neighborhood Villages is uniquely situated to take on this important project and fill this unmet need, which is critical to our children’s development.”

 “Young children develop and learn through play,” said Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Chair of Learning through Play at the LEGO Foundation. “With the new partnership with Neighborhood Villages, we are excited to see an evidence-based playful curriculum from age 1-8, which supports early educators and advances our mission to support the most vulnerable communities around the world.”

In 2021, in concert with the continued expansion of universal pre-kindergarten in Boston, BPS engaged Neighborhood Villages to build an enhanced iteration of the play-based “Focus on Early Learning” curriculum specifically for 3-year-olds, called “Focus on 3s.” This new initiative announced today will expand that curriculum to early education programs and create a vertically-aligned system from age 8 all the way down to age one. 

“Here at Boston Public Schools, our mission is to educate the whole child,” said Superintendent Mary Skipper. “The lifelong journey of learning begins at a young age and we are so proud to have such strong partners in developing a comprehensive curriculum that lays the foundation for success both in school and life after school.” 

Through its support of early learning centers with educator coaching and other teaching supports, Neighborhood Villages identified a major void when it comes to play-based curricula for toddlers (children ages 15 months through 2.9 years). Early educators currently face few choices for play-based, creative, and aligned curricula for this age group.

Early childhood programs can play a powerful role in supporting infants and toddlers as they develop physically, emotionally, socially, and cognitively. Research has demonstrated that strong curricula grounded in learning through play can guide early childhood educators and provide children with planful, engaging, and valuable learning in the early years. Access to vertically-aligned, quality and integrated early education programming is a matter of equity and can help address racial disparities.

Neighborhood Villages will pilot and evaluate the toddler curriculum with partner early learning centers through its existing program, The Neighborhood. The Neighborhood is a network of five Boston-based early education providers for which Neighborhood Villages serves as a centralized hub of support: the program models the ways in which K-12 districts support individual schools. Presently, The Neighborhood serves approximately 3,000 people, including 900 children.

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