 She wrote a series of four graded reading books ("Sounds Travel Too)" and other reading tutors in English and Afrikaans (Tom Kan Lees) that were widely used throughout the 1960s and 1970s for teaching the phonics reading method, as well as articles concerning the treatment of children with learning difficulties.Machanick was the second of three children born in Cape Town to immigrant parents; her mother from the United Kingdom and her father from Lithuania.Her mother, Edna Annie Love Courtnall, was one of the first female LLB graduates (1922) at the University of London, and she later set up a National Fellowship Award through the South African Association of Women graduates.