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Helen Keller, smiling, visits with three young schoolchildren.
Guide

Building a better Helen Keller lesson plan

Resources for teachers and students who want a Helen Keller lesson plan that goes beyond The Miracle Worker to reveal the real Helen Keller.

A lot of Helen Keller lesson plans are the same: they begin and end with The Miracle Worker, the story of Helen’s childhood in Alabama and her trek to Perkins School for the Blind with her teacher and lifelong friend Anne Sullivan.

It’s an important story, but it’s incomplete: you may think you know Helen Keller, but she was so much more than the little girl with deafblindness. As she moved through adulthood, she was an activist, an author, an advocate, and a world traveler. She was friends with great minds like author Mark Twain and inventor Alexander Graham Bell. She loved dogs and champagne toasts on her birthday. She was ordinary and extraordinary in equal measure.

It’s worth diving deeper into her story – and we can help. In this guide, teachers will find resources and information to enhance their Helen Keller lesson plan with a deeper understanding of Helen’s condition, little-known facts about her life, details of her accomplishments, and fun behind-the-scenes stories from our archives.

Fostering empathy: understanding deafblindness

Perkins helps kids with disabilities find their place in the world – and one of our most famous examples is Helen Keller. We’ve been a leader in disability education for 200 years, and our Deafblind School continues to serve students just like Helen today.

For teachers who want to help their students – both disabled and non-disabled – connect on a deeper level with Helen Keller’s story, we should first define what it means to be deafblind.

Helen Keller was certainly unique, but her condition was not exclusive to her. According to the National Center on Deafblindness, approximately 10,000 children and youth in the United States have been identified as deafblind. And according to Sense International, 160 million people around the world are affected by deafblindness.

So what does that mean? People who are deafblind experience some degree of both vision and hearing loss. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a complete loss of vision and/or hearing, although that is sometimes the case. Deafblindness is a spectrum – many people have some usable vision and/or hearing.

When Helen Keller was a child, awareness and understanding about deafblindness and disability in general were limited, making it difficult for people like her to get the help they needed to succeed.

Helen’s journey brought her to the experts at Perkins, where there has been an unwavering commitment to progress, learning, and support for kids with disabilities: from the 1800s when Helen was with us, throughout the 1900s (documented in the 1969 short film Deafblind Circus that captured the unique joy at the intersection of learning and fun as Perkins deafblind students execute a circus performance, complete with costumes and music, for a public audience), and right into the 21st century.

Helen Keller’s modern-day peers

Today, thanks to progress in education (video), advances in DisabilityTech solutions and a movement toward prioritizing accessibility and inclusion, people who are deafblind have access to accommodations and assistive technology that enable them to navigate the world alongside non-disabled peers.

Here are just a few examples of people – kids, young adults and adults – who are deafblind and have found their places in the world:

Now that you know a bit more about deafblindness, let’s talk about Helen!

The facts about Helen Keller

Want to get straight to the facts about Helen Keller? The Perkins Archives team is the go-to source for everything you need to know. These resources will get you started on the basics:

Beyond The Miracle Worker

If you’ve read or watched The Miracle Worker, you know the beginning of Helen Keller’s story.

Here, we’re going to introduce you to the whole person she became. These resources will allow you to explore her life and work – from the extraordinary (activist, author, traveler) to the ordinary (good friend, voracious reader, animal-lover.).

The original influencer

Helen Keller was an advocate who traveled around the world, kept amazing company and had connections in high places.

Helen Keller and her fabulous friends

Joseph Edgar (Ed) Chamberlin

Our “Day with Helen Keller” series gets us behind the scenes on the friendship among Helen, Anne Sullivan and Ed Chamberlin, a prominent Boston literary figure. Elizabeth Emerson, Chamberlin’s great-great-granddaughter, shares Ed’s observations from quiet days at Red Farm, a gathering place for literary and artistic figures of the day.

Polly Thomson

You’ve heard of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, but did you know there was a “Third Musketeer”? Meet Polly Thomson, who spent 46 years as Helen Keller’s companion and interpreter, but is relatively unknown.

Nella Braddy Henney

Helen’s editor and literary agent Nella Braddy Henney was also a close friend of the “Three Musketeers.”

Helen Keller’s beloved pets

Helen was an animal lover – including, yes, a jealous pet monkey!

Helen Keller: too good to be true?

Given her disability and the time period in which she lived, Helen Keller’s achievements are incredibly impressive. And for some people, that makes them hard to believe.

You may have recently come upon conspiracy theories on social media challenging how Helen could have been real. Or, if she was real, how she could have accomplished all that she did.

And believe it or not, the current generation wasn’t the first to have these questions – throughout Helen’s life, she was accused of being a fraud.

Well, we can assure you: Helen was real – really smart, really strong, really sophisticated.

And this deep dive into Helen’s accomplishments from the experts at Perkins Archives can help you set the record straight.

Helen Keller lesson plan discussion prompts

As you build your Helen Keller lesson plan, we hope this guide has introduced you to a lot of new information and will spark a fresh perspective about Helen’s work, her life and her impact on the world.

Here are some discussion prompts teachers can use to keep the conversation going:

Want more cool resources like this?

From Helen Keller’s incredible story to today’s innovations in DisabilityTech, we’re all about accessibility and disability inclusion – and you can be, too. Our monthly #FridayForward newsletter delivers the latest news, events and insight – plus simple actions you can take to help. Sign up to get the next issue delivered to your inbox!

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Helen Keller as a young girl, sitting and reading. She is in a high-back cushioned chair, and has one hand resting on a table with the index finger extended. Her feet are propped up on a small ottoman. A vase and framed photograph are on the table. She is wearing a white lace dress.
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