1. Background Information for Teachers:

When Anne Sullivan came to teach Helen Keller in the spring of 1887, it was the beginning of a brand new life for Helen. Within months she was signing, learning proper grammar, writing with a pencil, learning Braille, and just as important, how to live within society. Helen learned that her world was not out of her reach, but could be grasped in a way that she never knew was possible.

Helen amazed all those around her with how much she was learning in such a short amount of time. In May 1888, Helen and Anne traveled to Boston, where Helen spent several months at the Perkins Institute for the Blind. This was only the beginning of Helen's formal education. In October 1894 Helen went to the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. Miss Sullivan accompanied her. This school's main focus was teaching speech and lip-reading, but it also offered other subjects such as math, geography, and foreign languages. With a determined goal to someday go to college, Helen entered the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in October 1896 so that she could become prepared for college. She attended there for two years, studied one more year under a private teacher, and then after a long struggle enrolled in Radcliffe College in the fall of 1900 at the age of twenty. She graduated Radcliffe with honors in 1904.

Helen Keller beat all of the odds that were against her and grew up to be a very intelligent and well educated woman. She was an avid reader and was very fond of the Greek mythology classics. Helen was always reading books and even wrote some poetry and short stories of her own. She went on to become a role model for many people and became highly involved with different organizations committed to helping the blind and deaf. Helen traveled all over the world, spoke several different languages, and made acquaintances with many famous people, including Presidents of the United States Grover Cleveland and John F. Kennedy.

The life of Helen Keller is truly an inspirational one. All that she accomplished with her physical limitations is absolutely remarkable. She lived a long and happy life and died at the age of eighty-seven on June 1, 1968.

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2. Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of this lesson, students should be able to:

1. Have a greater apprecation for the great accomplishments of Helen Keller.
2. Understand and write about Helen Keller's poem, "Autumn."
3. Evaluate Helen's progress in writing by studying some of her early letters.
4. Give a brief summary of Helen Keller's later years.

3. Suggested Activities:

1. Make a classroom set of Documents 1, 2, 3. Distribute them to students and ask them to read them.
2. Discuss the example of Helen's writing in Document 1 and compare it to how the students write. Ask some volunteers to try to write like that on the board.
3. Select five readers to read the five stanzas of the poem "Autumn" in Document 2. Discuss the meaning of the poem. This is a good way to introduce imagery to the class.
4. Define "tapestries" and "resplendent."
5. Have children write their own poem about one of the seasons using imagery.
6. Have a student read out loud each of the letters written by Helen in Document 3. This will probably be difficult for them to make sense out of her undeveloped sentence skills, so help them out by pointing out the pauses to help them to make some sense.
7. For an English lesson, have students correct Helen's letters with proper capitalization and punctuation.
8. Create a fill-in-the-blank worksheet for students to work on that asks basic questions about Helen Keller's life.

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DOCUMENTS:

Document 1: Facsimile of portion of letter to Phillips Brooks written by Helen Keller, from The Story of my Life, pp. 8-9.
Document 2: "Autumn" by Helen Keller, Library of Congress.
Document 3: Letters of Helen Keller, from The Story of My Life, pp. 84-86.