Suzanne Barchers has a bachelor’s
degree in elementary Education from Eastern Illinois University, a master’s
degree in education from Oregon State University, and a doctorate of
education in curriculum and design from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
After teaching for fifteen years,
Barchers served as education director and deputy director of the Children’s
Museum of Denver, designing exhibits and programs, obtaining grants, and
managing staff.
After the publication in 1990 of her
first book, Creating and Managing the Literate Classroom, she began her
career in publishing. She built Teacher Ideas Press, the teacher resource
division of Libraries Unlimited, into a viable profit center. She next
developed a line of books for teachers, parents, and children for Fulcrum
Publishing, a trade publishing company in Colorado.
From 1990-1999, Barchers taught
graduate classes at the University of Colorado, Denver. Courses included
curriculum development, children’s literature, language arts, and expressive
arts.
She continued to write for the
education market, completing two college textbooks, 14 books of readers
theatre scripts, four educational cookbooks such as
Cooking Up U.S. History, and award
winning books such as Wise Women: Folk and Fairy Tales from Around the World. Barchers
wrote 36 elementary math and social studies readers for Teacher Created
Materials, plus a variety of student activity books. She wrote the
storybooks, teacher materials, and student activity guides for the
Targeted Phonics: Short Vowel Storybooks and
Targeted Phonics: Long Vowel Storybooks programs for Teacher Created
Materials. In addition, she wrote 19 children’s books for Footsteps 2
Brilliance plus the teacher materials. Her books for Moonshoot included a
variety of storybooks and activity books. She wrote 23 books for the LeapFrog SchoolHouse decodable series, and five
books for the LeapFrog Phonics Kits. She is the author of the Problem Solved
series of children’s books for Red Chair Press, bringing her total number of
published books to approximately 175. She has more than 40 articles in print
and has spoken at more than 100 workshops plus regional and national
conventions.
Barchers was Managing Editor for more
than four years at Weekly Reader in Stamford, CT, and she then served as
Editor in Chief and Vice President at LeapFrog for more than three years.
Barchers is on the PBS Next Generation Kids Media Advisory Board and is past
president of the board of directors for the Association of Educational
Publishers.
She consults and writes from her home in Stanford, CA.
