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?
LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) is a national nonprofit on a mission to transform early childhood education.
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LENA Grow
offers evidence-based professional development for early childhood educators.
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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.
In Indiana, LENA has reached 1.7k children and 350 early childhood educators since 2018, and LENA technology has recorded more than 1.4 million conversational turns.
October 16, 2024: Early Learning Indiana (ELI) announced today an innovative partnership with LENA, a national nonprofit that is a leader in research and programing focused on language development in young children. Funded by a $3.2 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., the partnership will improve the quality of verbal interactions between young children and their teachers in communities across Indiana by expanding a program called LENA Grow®. Read more ...
October 9, 2024: Early Learning Indiana (ELI) announced today that 68 community organizations have joined the Early Years Initiative receiving $23 million in grants to help them meet the developmental needs of infants and toddlers and surround Hoosier families with the resources to capitalize on the opportunities for learning that occur from birth to age 3. Read more ...
Early Learning Indiana identified LENA Grow and LENA Start as model programs for the Early Years Initiative. Across the state, 12 organizations have received Early Years Initiative funding to launch new LENA programs!
LENA Grow is an evidenced-based professional development program that helps teachers equitably improve classroom language environments in early learning settings, complementing Indiana Early Learning Standards. Download the crosswalk here.
LENA also has national crosswalks with Head Start, CLASS, The Pyramid Model, ZERO TO THREE, and more.
Family Development Services manages the Head Start and Early Head Start programs in Marion and Hamilton Counties. With funding from the Early Years Initiative, the organization brought LENA Grow to their classrooms in 2024. One of the most consistent benefits of any LENA Grow program is that it helps the children who need it the most. The children who came into the program experiencing the least amount of interaction with their teachers end up gaining the most. That has certainly been the case at Family Development Services. Children who had been experiencing fewer than the national average of 15 conversational turns per hour saw a 117% increase by the end of the five-week LENA Grow program! Research shows that that increase in teacher interaction will help their social-emotional and literacy skills, as well as their overall kindergarten readiness. Read more ...
Published in the journal Infant and Child Development, a study out of Purdue University used LENA technology to find that:
“The state of Indiana is doing incredible work to align its early learning standards to the latest research on early education practices and child development, and LENA is poised to make groundbreaking contributions. We envision our wealth of data on teacher-child interaction immediately benefitting on-the-ground practice and ultimately informing systemic policy decisions to ensure that children from birth to age five experience the highest quality early childhood education possible.”
Whether you're with a school district, CCR&R, state agency, library, university-community partnership, public health initiative, or any other organization dedicated to improving early childhood outcomes, we want to help you put your organization on the LENA map.
Connect with
Charlotte Johnson,
Statewide Manager, Indiana
CharlotteJohnson@lena.org
I am a Midwest native who has called North Indy home since 2016. I have over 15 years of experience in the early childhood field, as a teacher, developmental therapist, Director, and state quality specialist. I have degrees in ECE, Business Administration, and Educational Psychology, but more importantly, I have a passion for creating high-quality programs and meaningful professional development opportunities. I am so excited to help bring the magic of LENA to programs and providers across Indiana. Contact me for more information and let’s get started! I'm excited to be working with my colleague Luis Bernal:
Connect with
Luis Bernal,
Regional Partnerships Director
LuisBernal@lena.org
Partner success stories and research findings in Indiana and beyond.
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?
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!
One veteran teacher’s LENA Grow journey: “It kind of goes back to my childhood. I struggled with learning. I never really had anyone who taught me that as long as I kept trying, I could.”
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.