Page 53 - Senior Link Magazine Summer 2020- Online Magazine

with them wherever they go, and then grow into
middle-aged adults with giant novels as their daily fare
are commonplace in her lineage.

It is not just the ability to read but the love of it.

Now, at 85 years of age, Maudene’s passion for reading
and education has been fully realized as a legacy. It
reaches not only the lives being daily changed by the
gift of literacy but throughout all of education. To
date, four of her daughters and one granddaughter
have used her method to teach not only their own
children to read but other children professionally. Two
of her daughters and one granddaughter are full-time
educators in both the private and public sectors. In her
home, on any given day, there will be 5-10 children
in teens, and even special needs adults who were told being taught to read, and all throughout the nation,
they would never learn to read. people who have been touched by her gift of reading are
living and working.
What makes Denney Reading so much different than the
rest is its unshakeable foundation in phonics. Maudene I know all of this to be true because I am her educator
says, “It is precept upon precept, each one building on granddaughter, who is forever grateful that she taught
the last. You CANNOT move on and do them out of 4-year-old me how to read.
order because that does not build confidence in the skill.”
Learning the mechanics of phonics is often overlooked
in education, in favor of memorization techniques. The
disconnect happens when the child moves on from
those memorized sight words and cannot apply the
“rules” to words they have never seen before. They learn
to memorize a few basic codes but are not given the
training to crack them all.

Denney Reading not only provides strong phonics
skills but also brings letters to life. Each letter gets a
personality and a job. The student builds a relationship
to them and learns their jobs and personalities and,
more importantly, how they change when other letters
are introduced. Children as young as 3½ years old have
learned to read multisyllabic words and chapter books
and also to read with inflection and tone. It may seem
a small thing, until you enter a classroom and see the
confidence level of a student who knows how to convey
what the words are saying compared to one who is
simply regurgitating symbols they recognize.

There is no greater evidence of Denney Reading
success than that of Maudene’s own family. Most of
her children, all of her grandchildren, and even her one
great-grandchild have been taught to read using her
method. Children who read incessantly throughout the
day, under blankets with flashlights, carrying books

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