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Butterfly ParkTM Early Literacy Introduction to Letter Sounds was created by Mary C. Forhan and illustrated by Darcie C. Frohardt 17 years ago when our children were in preschool. We wanted a fun, active method to teach our own children letter sounds before they went to kindergarten. With Mary’s teaching background supported by a masters in reading, Darcie’s background in art and illustration, and our own five children as guinea pigs, we had the knowledge, experience, skills, and personal motivation to create a sequential phonics program our own children would love. We believed then, and as the latest reading research has since verified, that children need a sequential approach to letter sounds and direct instruction on how to sound out words. Not only did our children learn letter sounds quickly, they learned to read fluently and effortlessly!

Mary closed her preschool, our children went to school, and we set the program aside.

17 years later, with over 20 years of experience teaching preschool through college students, Mary started her own school. She is now the director and K/1 teacher at Forhan Academy. Darcie became a reading specialist, teacher trainer, and primary grades teacher in the Cherry Creek School District in Colorado; and more recently, the preschool teacher at Forhan Academy. As we began working with more and more struggling readers, we searched for new ways to tackle the problems of active children with more specialized needs who weren’t being served by existing traditional methods. We realized that our program had all the elements that would help not only these children but all children.

By using a multisensory program which taught children through sight, sound, and movement, struggling readers could connect to and learn letter sounds they hadn’t been able to learn previously. With our ongoing training and investigations in reading research, behavioral science, and brain research, we incorporated even more of the necessary reading strategies identified by the latest research into our program.

We both began using Butterfly Park^TM Early Literacy Introduction to Letter Sounds in our classrooms and in one-on-one tutoring sessions. The results with the children in our classrooms and tutorials were just as phenomenal as with our own children 20 years ago.

Word soon spread to other teachers in our district and they began asking us for the program. We developed a teacher training program, and teachers began using Butterfly Park^TM Early Literacy Introduction to Letter Sounds. Before long they began reporting the same results we experienced at home, in our classrooms, and in our tutorials.

Butterfly Park^TM Early Literacy Introduction to Letter Sounds is different!

Butterfly Park^TM Early Literacy Introduction to Letter Sounds asks parents and teachers to look at letters and sounds in a totally new way.

• Children learn the sounds of letters by the actions of the children and animals inside each letter and not by the names of the children and animals. Children do not have to take the initial sound off the word and isolate it. Our approach goes directly to the letter sound without intermediate steps.
• Children learn by using their entire bodies to act out the stories and often make the shape of the letters (another great strategy supported by the latest brain research on how children best learn).
• Children learn through interactions with adults and other children rather than sitting quietly in front of a computer.
• Children learn more than one sound for many of the letters (a, e, i, o, u, y, c, g, and s) and sounds for combinations of letters (ch, th, sh, wh, oo, ou, and ow).
• Children act our sounds with their whole bodies or with small hand cues in sequence to create words.
• Children put letters on the blending train to see how the sounds of letters can be blended together quickly to make words as the train moves faster and faster.