Using text, photographs, quotations, and film footage, The Helen Keller Kids Museum presents a wealth of online information about the life and legacy of Helen Keller, a deafblind woman who changed the perception of what it means to be blind.
The online museum traces the life of Helen Keller from her childhood and education under Anne Sullivan, to her subsequent education in New York City and Massachusetts. The museum’s presentation continues with Keller’s early political activism and career as a leading advocate for those with vision loss in the United States and her eventual fame as a preeminent advocate worldwide. Included in the museum’s exhibits are multiple photographs of Helen Keller with politicians, actors, children, and people of every station in life.
To learn more about Helen Keller’s life and advocacy, students can explore the Helen Keller Archives at the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). There they will find a selection of Helen Keller’s letters, including a poignant series of correspondence between Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan, as well as letters with correspondents such as Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, and seven US Presidents.
In addition, the AFB offers free, digitally inclusive lesson plans that use the rich trove of information contained in the Helen Keller Archival Collection to teach middle school and high school students about digital and physical archives and how to use them, as well as the difference between primary and secondary sources and how to read and analyze them. Each lesson plan includes detailed teaching suggestions with accompanying teacher and student activity pages.
The following lessons are currently available to freely download:
Lesson One: Introduction to Digital and Physical Archives
Lesson Two: Primary and Secondary Sources
Lesson Three: Votes for Women, A Voice for All: Helen Keller, Suffragist
The goal of the lessons is to enable teachers to guide students in using digital archival collections while discovering Helen Keller’s work as a leading author, activist, and advocate.