About Honey Root

Honey Root is a reading practice app for kids 5 to 10 who guess at words, with or without a diagnosis. Your child reads real stories out loud. Honey Root listens word by word, teaches the sound behind a word that goes wrong, and moves on only when a skill holds. After every session you get a plain note saying what was practiced. It works in the browser, there is nothing to install, and it is free during early access.

Who makes Honey Root?

Honey Root LLC is a small company in Illinois, founded in 2026 by Dustin Sitar. It is built by a parent, for families going through this: a child who guesses at words, advice to wait and see, and apps that keep kids busy without teaching them to read.

We make one thing. We try to make it the way a good reading tutor works, and to tell you plainly what your child is working on, what clicked, and what comes next.

How does Honey Root teach?

The way the International Dyslexia Association recommends for children who struggle with reading. The approach is called structured literacy, and in Honey Root it looks like this.

• Sounds in a planned order. Each step teaches one letter-sound pattern explicitly, then practices it.
• Stories your child can actually read. Every story is built only from sounds your child has been taught, so sounding out works on every word and there is nothing to guess at.
• Teaching at the moment it matters. When a word goes wrong, Honey Root stops, teaches the sound behind it, and listens while your child reads it again.
• Moving on only when a skill holds. New sounds come when the current one is solid, not after a set number of days.

The research behind this is long-standing. The National Reading Panel found that explicit, systematic phonics produced the strongest gains for beginning readers, and that guided reading aloud, with feedback, helped word reading, fluency and comprehension.

Who reviews what we build?

Educators who work with struggling readers every day review Honey Root as it grows, including a reading specialist and a director of special education. They look at how it teaches and at what each story asks of a child, and their notes change what we build.

What won’t Honey Root do?

It won’t diagnose your child. Honey Root does not diagnose or treat dyslexia or any reading condition. It finds where your child’s reading is and teaches from there.

It won’t replace a specialist or a school evaluation. If one has been recommended, use both.

And it won’t turn reading into a game of points. There are no points, coins, streaks or timers. The prize in a game is the word itself, which goes on a shelf your child can read back any time.

How is my child’s data handled?

Honey Root is built for children, so a parent sets up every account and gives consent first, as US children’s privacy law requires. There are no ads, ever, and we never sell data. Your child’s reading is used to run the session. Keeping short clips to improve Honey Root happens only if you say yes, and you can delete your child’s data at any time. The privacy policy explains the rest in plain language.