About HyFo

Why we're building HyFo

Plenty of children can read, technically, and still can't get through a page. They lose their place, drift off after a paragraph, read the words and miss the meaning, and after a few evenings of that they start to avoid books altogether. Parents see it happening and can't tell whether the problem is reading, attention, motivation or all three.

Most reading apps aren't built for these children. They assume a child can sit through a twenty-minute session, follow a busy screen and stay motivated by streaks and leaderboards. For a child with a short attention span, that design is the problem.

HyFo started from a simple question: what would reading practice look like if it were designed around how these children actually read? Short. One task at a time. Gentle. And measurable, so parents know whether it's working.

Who's behind it

Kateryna Menzhyk, founder. Kateryna leads the product and writes most of what you'll find on this site. You can reach her and the team at hello@hyfokids.com, through HyFo on LinkedIn or her personal profile.

HyFo is built by a small team of product, engineering and education people working in English and Ukrainian. The app is in free beta, and the families using it shape what gets built next: every exercise type, instruction and dashboard card has been revised based on their feedback.

What the exercises are based on

HyFo is a practice tool, not a curriculum, and it leans on well-established findings about how children learn to read:

• Reading fluency is built through many short, successful reads. Repeated reading of short texts at the right level is the most consistently supported fluency method in the research literature (including the US National Reading Panel's 2000 review). HyFo's sessions are built around short texts and small steps.
• Speed only matters with understanding. HyFo measures words per minute only in its checked-reading exercise, and only after the child answers comprehension questions. The reference points parents see come from the 2017 Hasbrouck & Tindal oral reading fluency norms.
• Attention is a design constraint. One task on screen, short instructions read aloud, a visible end to every session and no competing stimuli are the same recommendations specialists make for children with ADHD. They help every child who finds reading effortful.
• Mistakes should be cheap. Difficulty rises one step at a time, going back is never penalised, and feedback after a wrong answer is a calm "try again".

We're careful about what we claim. HyFo is an educational tool. It does not diagnose, treat or replace school, tutoring, speech-language therapy or medical support from qualified professionals.

What we publish

Our blog covers the questions parents ask us most: how to get a child to read, what to do when a child loses focus, reading speed by age, and how to track progress at home. Every article names its sources and is written to be useful whether or not you ever use the app.

Contact

The quickest way to reach us is email: hello@hyfokids.com. You can also send a message to HyFo on LinkedIn. If you're a teacher, speech-language therapist or researcher and would like to try the beta with the families you work with, we'd like to hear from you.