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.
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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!
Dr. Constance Beecher, a LENA partner and Associate Professor of Family Literacy at Iowa State University, appeared on Iowa Public Radio's "Talk of Iowa" program in September of 2022 to discuss early language development, social-emotional development, COVID, and LENA. Take a listen!
"We understand really well what leads to positive language development, and it really is back-and-forth conversations between caring adults and young children. … We’ve seen with our LENA studies documented differences in social development due to increased amounts of rich language conversations."
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
Jodi Whiteman,
Director, Partnerships & Growth, Iowa
JodiWhiteman@lena.org
Read these and other stories about partner success stories and research findings in Iowa and beyond.
“The thing I found the most interesting in the classes was the difference between reading to and reading with a child,” Lily explained. “Roseanna had heard the entire Harry Potter series, but we didn’t read it together, so the same parts of her brain weren’t lighting up.”
Families who participated in LENA Start provided increasingly rich home language environments for their children, expanding how much they talked to and with them over the duration of the three-month class, compared to families who did not attend, new research has found.
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!
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.
