Barb Spanier, Teacher & Director

Barb has three sons: ages 19, 18, and 4. Her first round of homeschooling began 14 years ago. While it is all too quickly winding down, she is looking forward with excitement to a second round of home education with her youngest. With Barb’s background as a Bible teacher with a BA degree in Bible and Bible Teaching from Columbia International University, there was no question that Tapestry, with its strong commitment to teaching God’s story to the next generation, would become her choice for the backbone of their homeschooling. In fact, Tapestry became a family favorite eight years ago and she has been teaching and leading Tapestry virtual co-ops for seven years. With the opening of the Lampstand Learning Center, she is thrilled to be able to offer the experience that has enriched her family's education to other families. Barb currently resides in Florida with her husband of 22 years and their sons.

Email Barb (bspanier@llc.tapestryofgrace.com) — she'd love to answer your questions!

Jana Alexander

Teaching has been a passion throughout Jana's life. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill with a B.S. in Industrial Relations, Jana taught computer programming and computer applications at the middle school, high school, community college, and corporate levels for twelve years. Once her first child was born, she realized the Lord was calling her to stay at home to be a wife and mother. When her two children reached school age, she began homeschooling them and knew she had found her calling. The Lord led Jana to the Tapestry of Grace curriculum when her son reached 5th grade, and they are now completing their seventh year with the program. They have completed the four-year cycle once through with TOG Classic, and are in their third year with Redesigned. Jana led a local TOG co-op for five years, where she taught the dialectic and rhetoric levels of history and literature, both in classrooms and online. She resides with her husband, two children, and two terriers in North Carolina. When she's not teaching TOG, Jana reads, knits, and gardens.

Teresa Burger

Teresa Burger is the wife of a career Marine Corps officer and is currently living in Virginia with their three children (ages 14, 12, and 10). As a military wife, she has made her home in ten different states (so far), with each child being born in a different location. She has taught in a variety of roles—from private preschool teacher, to substitute elementary teacher, to Curriculum Specialist. Mrs. Burger earned her B.A. in Early Childhood Development and, after the birth of her third child in 2001, an M.A. in Human Development. When her oldest child was school age, she set her sights on returning to the workforce and teaching community college courses, but God brought His plan of homeschooling into her heart. Teresa has been homeschooling for nine years and using Tapestry of Grace for the past four years. She was blessed to be a teacher in an online TOG co-op and is entering the second year of her teaching journey with the Lampstand Learning Center.

Sheri Payne

Sheri and her husband decided to homeschool before their first child was born. She and her husband, a 28-year Navy veteran, move around the world with their three lively children. Her passion for history has been utilized in numerous co-op classes, including one very exciting class in Hawaiian history in a co-op in Mililani, Hawaii. After years of trying to craft her own classical curriculum, she discovered Tapestry and finally found her niche. This is her sixth year using the Tapestry program, and she has been blessed to have dabbled in Classic, Redesign, and DE. She hopes to one day complete the last semester she needs to earn her B.S. in Computer Science, and to add another degree in History. She currently lives in Virginia.

Rachel Schaefer

Rachel Schaefer is thankful for the opportunity she has had to homeschool her children and is now pleased to be part of the teaching team at the Lampstand Learning Center. She grew up in Massachusetts, earned a teaching degree at Calvin College in Michigan, and taught in Washington before settling in Maryland where she lives with her husband and three children. Although she began in 2000 as a "reluctant homeschooler," each year God provided the encouragement, support, and desire to continue; before long she was hooked. As her own children are growing up, her prayer is that she can encourage and assist other homeschool families in their education journeys. Active in her local homeschool co-op, she has taught many enrichment classes including art, government, nutrition, and journalism, and for the past seven years has taught writing to middle and high school students. She enjoys cooking, crafting, reading, and playing Scrabble.

Lisa Schumacher

Lisa is an Army wife and mother to three boys who are 13, 11, and 9. She and her husband have lived all over the United States and in Europe during their twenty-year marriage. Her professional background includes banking as well as teaching finance and economics at the collegiate level. However, her passion is to teach from a godly perspective. Great literature has been the academic highlight of her family’s eight-year homeschooling journey and she has developed a passion for imparting her enthusiasm for books and poetry to her own children and others through her recent experience with an online Tapestry coop. She has found that the TOG literature discussion approach fits perfectly with her aspiration to encourage the essential balance between critical and gracious thinking. Her family will be living at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York for the next several years.

Teri Skidmore

What Teri really loves to do is teach. She has found opportunities to do so for the past seven years through Tapestry co-ops, private schools, and tutoring (tutoring all of WriteAtHome's Tapestry students since that program began). Teri earned a B.S. in Computer Science and worked as a computer system engineer, corporate trainer, and project manager before becoming a mother. Teri is a computer geek at heart, and now that her children are grown, she is excited to have the opportunity to bring Tapestry to life online for students around the corner and around the world! We know you will find that her unique blend of enthusiasm for teaching and tech-savvy approach makes her a lively and engaging discussion leader. She and her husband have graduated four great kids, and live outside Saginaw, Michigan.

Melanie Smith

After 23 years of relocating all over the world with her Navy husband, Melanie and her family have finally settled down in Texas, ready to face the next season of life after military retirement. She has four children, two of which are TOG graduates and two which are still at home in school. Melanie has been teaching Tapestry in virtual and local co-ops since 2005. She has taught rhetoric and dialectic classes in both History and Literature throughout all four year plans of Tapestry. She also owns and manages TOGLooseThreads, an "unofficial" Tapestry Yahoo Group which ministers to about 2,000 families worldwide. Melanie feels passionate about Tapestry and feels blessed to be a part of what God is doing through the Lampstand Learning Center.

Christy Somerville

Christy lives in Maryland and has been using Tapestry since age fourteen, when she was one of the original students in Marcia Somerville's first co-ops. Since then, Christy has received a B.A. in Literature from Patrick Henry College and participated in the four-year Redesign Project as a staff author, becoming the architect of Tapestry's Redesign Literature program for rhetoric level students. She has also been teaching Tapestry's rhetoric literature to her own co-op class in Maryland for two years. Christy is excited about the opportunity to extend her love of literature with students to wider regions through Lampstand Learning Center!

Lisa Whitney

Lisa lives with her husband, their teenage son, a pair of draft horses, and numerous sheep, goats, wildflowers, and blueberries on a farm in Maine. She and her husband had planned to circumnavigate the world on their sailboat with their children when they reached school age; however, the Lord obviously had a different plan when He led them to bring their daughters home to school in 1999. She rediscovered a passion for learning alongside her kids as well as for teaching and has graduated her two older daughters, now in their 20’s. Lisa holds a B.S. in Natural Sciences and has worked as a nuclear medicine technologist, as well as a draftsman for an engineering and land surveying firm. She has taught numerous courses in her local home school co-op, including logic, science, and writing. She was delighted to discover Tapestry of Grace four years ago, and taught history and literature in a virtual co-op last year.