LENA - Building brains through early talk
Here are some tips for turning read-aloud time into interactive conversation time for the young children in your life.
Family engagement is one of the most important parts of any child care professional’s job. We’ve created a Family Engagement Toolkit to help our LENA Grow partners.
Early brain development depends so much on having back-and-forth conversations, even for infants and toddlers. Here are six tips to help you talk more!
LENA has collected and analyzed its most expansive data set to date through the 10,000 children annually impacted by our programs for families and early childhood teachers.
Two of our partners share their thoughts on the importance of Black History Month and how they integrate their personal beliefs into their professional work.
The virtual format offered families a powerful opportunity to connect when they otherwise couldn’t during the pandemic.
The virtual participants showed similar gains to pre-pandemic, in-person groups, with lower-talk families increasing conversational turns with their children by 12 percentile points and adult words by 35 percentile points.
Explore key learnings on how community programs can recruit and retain families.
Two teams share how they’ve adapted their data-collection process to continue their studies.
Explore tips and strategies for making video calls more interactive for young children.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the team in Virginia Beach knew that they couldn’t afford to wait to transition to virtual programming for families and teachers.
When the pandemic hit, community organizations found their regular programming for families abruptly cut off. Learn why three pivoted to virtual.
The professional development program has been built into Colorado’s statewide initiative to improve quality in infant and toddler care.
Porter-Leath uses LENA programs to boost early literacy and connect teachers and families.
A new study on LENA Start from the University of Minnesota discovered that the program can be successfully implemented in community-based settings and that families enjoy participating.
Early childhood teachers at The Primary School in East Palo Alto, Calif., used LENA Grow professional development to better understand and improve interactions in their classrooms.
Coaches have created a new system to ensure teachers are still receiving crucial PD on how to support early brain development.
A pilot of the professional development program shows that teachers significantly increased the amount of interaction with the children in their classrooms.
At Best Memories Academy in Orlando, parents and teachers are partnering together virtually to create rich early childhood language environments for children.
We analyzed data from 1,700 program participants and found that families report spending more time with children, talking more, and feeling more confident in their parenting abilities.
In New York City, LENA Start classes empowered Spanish- and Arabic-speaking families to value their native languages and maintain them across generations.
In New Zealand, LENA is a tool to empower whānau (families) to connect to culture and each other.
Researchers found a correlation between three of LENA’s measures – adult word count, conversational turns, and child vocalizations — and children’s language and cognitive skills.
For Pamela Robinson, a family child care provider in Georgia, using LENA Grow was an opportunity to show parents all the brain-building interaction that happens during the day in her home as she watches children.
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.
