Jennifer Havens joined the Early Childhood Community Development Centre in 2008 as a Early Learning and Child Care Program Consultant. In this role she is responsible to support Niagara’s Early Learning and Child Care programs in their efforts to deliver developmentally appropriate high quality programs to children and their families. She does this by visiting programs and offering guidance and support to staff in their utilization of ECCC’s educational resources, developing play based learning kits for the ECCDC resource lending library, and designing and facilitating training activities.
Jennifer is a Registered Early Childhood Educator that graduated with honours from Niagara College of Applied Arts and Technology in 1999. Her first experience in child care came that year when she became an educator with Rosalind Blauer Centre for Child Care. It was there she stayed until joining the Early Childhood Community Development Centre team after nearly 10 years of frontline experience. While working full time she continued to participate in a variety of professional development workshops and training seminars.
In 2006 prior to Jennifer's position at the ECCDC, she started developing and facilitating workshops for frontline staff on a variety of curriculum topics. It was through the development of these workshops that Jennifer got her reputation as the go to girl for developmental programming and curriculum development. Then in 2007 she was invited to join the Quality Child Care Niagara initiative as a Phase 2 Training Facilitator for Developmental Programming, where she assisted in evaluating and revising the trainers manual to include hands on delivery of critical planning practices and creating model program plan outlines and examples. Since arriving at the ECCDC Jennifer has continued to build on this reputation by continuing to provide Lending Library based workshops on a monthly basis, as well as using that unique perspective to continue the revitalization of the play based learning kits, program resource visits and Customized Professional Development Workshops. Jennifer also sits on the Awards of Excellence planning committee as a silent auction liaison.
Jennifer’s commitment to the field of Early Childhood Education has been recognized by Niagara College and the Association of Early Childhood Educators, Ontario when she received the 1999 Association of Early Childhood Educators, Ontario student award for excellence as well as the Early Childhood Educators' Award of Excellence in 2002. In addition to her role at the ECCDC Jennifer has also presented at both the Association of Early Childhood Educators, Ontario Niagara and Provincial conferences on a variety of frontline topics including, Sensory Integration, Science Concepts for Early Learners and Gardening in the Early Learning Environment. Most recently Jennifer was an intricate partner in the development and facilitation of the Early Math Skills Training Pilot Project.
Jennifer has become well known and respected in child care centres across Niagara and is proud of the strong foundational relationships she has built with frontline staff, supervisors, directors, managers and early learning professionals. Often times Jennifer can be found conjuring up scientific experiments and concoctions, mathematical resources, hands on educator materials and creative wonders. Most of all she has a love for children and a deep understanding and respect for the early learning educators and community partners that play a key role in the on going quality of care for young children in the Niagara Region. It is this love and understanding, intertwined with sense of humour and dedication to the early learning and child care community that make her who she is today.