LEAP participants in the playground outside LeFrak Hall, the site of the program.
The playground outside LeFrak Hall is for more than just recess — it’s an integral part of a 20-year-old language-learning program through which kids not only learn to play but also develop one of the most fundamental skills of human society: language and speech.
The Language-Learning Early-Advantage Program, a preschool program run on the campus through the hearing and speech sciences department, focuses on language-based learning and is designed for children who have primary speech and language delays. The program celebrated its 20th anniversary in September.
“We really have a three-part mission: to train students, to serve the public and to conduct research,” said Dianne Handy, the LEAP preschool director.
Undergraduate and graduate students seeking a degree within the hearing and speech sciences department teach the LEAP classes, which include six to eight 3- to 5-year-old children. The classes, which run in the spring, summer and fall, have a student-teacher ratio of about 1-to-1.
Located in LeFrak’s basement, LEAP looks like a regular preschool classroom — there are inviting wall decorations and posters, blocks and toys, games and bulletin boards arranged in a homey, manner. There’s also a large one-way mirror so parents can observe their children interacting not only in the classroom but also in the separate language labs when the children go in for therapy.
This year, there are 14 children enrolled: eight in the morning session and six in the afternoon, Handy said.
Anyone can enroll in the program. The attendees come from various surrounding areas, and Nan Bernstein Ratner, professor and hearing and speech sciences department chairwoman, said parents generally choose LEAP because a university-based program offers many benefits independent schools can’t offer.
University affiliation means a lot of research and training goes into the program’s construction, and it’s cheaper than other private programs.
The program began in September 1993, and for the first 10 years, founders spent much time researching its effectiveness and validating the original curriculum developed.
“We weren’t just content giving the kids a curriculum or therapy; we were actually actively making sure that it worked,” Ratner said.
If children have language impairments that aren’t addressed while they’re young, they may be more likely to have academic difficulties when they start school, said Ratner, the program’s founder. It’s not about the language the children hear; rather, it’s about having direct interactions with people, she said, such as one-on-one conversations between students and teachers, which proved effective.
“We’re a language-based classroom,” Handy said. “So we immerse the kids in language concepts with everything we do.”
The curriculum focuses on different concepts each week, and each school day is full of playtime, instruction and therapy, she said. The kids have one-on-one speech and language therapy sessions as well as story time, music, and alphabetic and social skills practice.
With its 20th anniversary, LEAP has had the opportunity to follow up on its own progress and the progress of previous attendees. Considering the roughly 300 children who have been involved over the years, “virtually all students” enter mainstream classes, Ratner said, and some become longtime friends.
Janessa Pope, a speech pathology graduate student, helps out with the therapy sessions. Pope and several other graduate students pull children out of class for 30-minute one-on-one speech and language therapy sessions. Together, they work on skills such as language, sound-symbol association and sentence construction.
“The teachers are always constantly using speech and language as a way of interacting with the kids,” Pope said. “We all know what the kids are working on; we’re all on the same page.”
The undergraduates who take part in LEAP see it as an entryway to graduate school, as it offers hands-on experience in the environment in which they wish to work.
“I observe the therapy sessions, and I see what [the kids] are working on,” said senior hearing and speech sciences major Taylor Wilde as she finished cleaning up the classroom after Friday’s morning session. “And then I see how they’re applying it in the classroom.”
Although the undergraduates do not lead the therapy, they do take turns leading classroom activities with the children.
The LEAP program plans to celebrate its 20 years on Maryland Day in April and is looking into opening another location to focus on children with autism and creating a cochlear implant program for hearing at the current location, Ratner said.
“A lot of our kids come in here using single words,” Handy said. “And when they leave, they carry out conversations.”
