Carol Medhurst

Carol Medhurst

2016 Innovation Award - Peel

Caledon Parent Child Centre

Nominator Comments:

Carol is an outside the box thinker. She has been instrumental in fundraising efforts. She also tailors her activities to get the most of each and every child participating in her programs – helping these young children blossom.

Carol has been fundamental at helping to implement and carry out ideas to increase revenue, finding many resourceful ways to gather funds and equipment to help expand our capacity to deliver high quality educational and exciting programs. Not only for our main centre in Bolton, but in our rural locations as well. Carol was able to obtain a donation from the Philip-Smith Foundation. This provided us with a generous donation for consecutive years.

Helping to obtain donations for our silent auction, putting together a read-a-thon, gathering private donations are just a few of the many things that she has done to help funding and improve services.

Carol dedicates her time and energy in order to create and implement highly creative and engaging programs for young children and their parents/caregivers. Carol adheres to the Early Learning for Every Child Today (ELECT) Document in her planning and facilitating activities and programs, fostering high levels of creativity in order to meet the domain criterion.

Parents/caregivers and children alike continue to enroll in her programs, excited to find out what their next adventure will be. She does an incredible job of teaching parents/caregivers how children learn effectively through play, teaching them innovative ways to implement certain strategies at home, in order to continue this learning process.

Carol differentiates her activities in order to get the most out of each and every child who walks into her programs. In turn, this fosters an environment in which the child learns to the best of their abilities.

Carol is an incredible role model and mentor to staff, students, parents and volunteers. She is continuously finding ways to implement and adjust programs to foster and further the development of young children.

Carol also helps parents and caregivers to obtain information to enhance their parenting skills through their exciting and creative programs as well as their role modeling skills.

She has worked very hard to implement and adjust programs to incorporate the ELECT philosophy and the Ministry of Educations new pedagogy into programs.

Educating parents on this new implementation and changes is something Carol has spent a lot of time incorporating. Posting the different skills and domain being fostered in her programs that day and talking to parents/caregivers about these is one of the ways that she does this.

Carol also developed a planning template to help implement this pedagogy into programs which she has shared with other staff.

Mentoring and educating college and university students in her programs on this new implementation is a way she has helped shaped future professionals on these changes.

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