LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) is a national nonprofit on a mission to transform children's futures through early talk technology and data-driven programs. LENA works with a wide range of partner organizations to boost early brain development and improve school readiness for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.
Since 2017, LENA has served 1,800 children and 240 early childhood educators in Illinois, and LENA technology has recorded over 2.6 million conversational turns. Put your community on the map!
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LENA Grow
offers evidence-based professional development for infant, toddler, and preschool teachers.
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LENA Start
builds school readiness and strengthens families with parent-group classes.
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LENA SP
offers reliable, detailed language environment data in research and clinical applications.
LENA has crosswalks with Head Start, CLASS, The Pyramid Model, ZERO TO THREE, and more!
"LENA provides a data-driven model to monitor and drive readiness for our families. Districts without a tool for measuring early talk are basically crossing their fingers and hoping that their children come to school ready. Wouldn’t it make more sense to use data collection at 15 to 21 months, when children typically make a huge leap in development? LENA helps connect brain research with the data-driven decision processes that school districts aspire to."
Whether you're with a library, school district, CCR&R, state agency, university-community partnership, public health initiative, or any other organization dedicated to improving early childhood outcomes, we invite you to learn more about bringing LENA to your community.
Connect with
Luis Bernal,
Regional Partnerships Director, Illinois
LuisBernal@LENA.org
Read these and other stories about partner success stories and research findings in Illinois and beyond.
Dr. Lucy Hart Paulson, co-author of LETRS for Early Childhood Educators, on how learning to talk and learning to read and write happen in parallel. Learning to read starts earlier than you think, and conversational turns are an important piece of the puzzle!
Your questions on school readiness answered by the director of instruction of Bourbonnais 53 school district in Illinois.
Your room’s arrangement, materials, and how you present them all affect learning, for both the children and you. How can you create a space that lets you focus on strong relationships with the children you care for?
It’s more important than ever to equip early childhood educators to address children’s unique needs and help get their language and social-emotional development on track. There’s strong new evidence to suggest that LENA Grow, a language-focused professional development program for early educators, is effective at doing just that.
What role may a child’s earliest interactions play in laying the foundation for learning to read? In this webinar, we take an expert deep dive into how conversational turns from ages birth to five fit into the ongoing discussions around the “science of reading.”
It’s no easy task for early childhood leaders to strategically disburse funds from PDG B-5, CCDBG, CLSD, and ARPA grants into the hands of LEAs and CCR&Rs. In fact, the alphabet soup of early childhood education funding streams can be a bit hard to digest, so to speak. In this webinar, state leaders will tell the stories of how and why they invested in initiatives for statewide implementation, as well as their visions for further expansion and impact.
